


Black Hole

by minuseven



Category: Prototype (Video Game), Worm (Web Serial Novel)
Genre: Crossover, Descent into Madness, Existential Angst, Gen, Shakespeare Quotations, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-05 20:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minuseven/pseuds/minuseven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t think you’re a monster,” I said.</p><p>She laughed briefly, and it was a dark utterance with no humor in it.  “No?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was drowning in the middle of a flooded street. With a gasp it lifted itself from the water, sputtering and coughing until it cleared the water from its lungs. Slowly, it rose to its feet, watching its surroundings. It was night and the city was mostly silent, dark. Distantly, it heard dogs bark.

It… didn’t remember. It examined itself, perturbed. It was wearing torn, wet clothes. Even the shoes were damaged. It had been in the water, so wet made sense. But torn?

It wasn’t hurt. It realized it could feel itself, its body and flesh, and it was unhurt. The body was functioning just fine. But then why didn’t it remember? And what wasn’t it remembering?

It frowned, disturbed by the lack of… everything. Then it concentrated, tried rememberi-

_surpassed him_  
 _horror_  
 _hatred_  
 _monster_  
 _in her eyes_  
 _any eyes_

_Monster_

Doubling over, gasping for breath, it decided it wasn’t that it  _couldn’t_  remember, but that it didn’t  _want_  to remember. Strange. Painful too. It needed more context and it needed to think if it really wanted to know. It opened its eyes, and it caught its reflection on the water it was standing on.

Brown hair, not straight. Brown eyes. Freckles. Female, plain,  _me_.

The fugue was broken.

Amy stumbled back, righting herself quickly. Her breath came in short pants.

She knew who she was now. Amy Dallon. Panacea. She remembered. And she didn’t. It was academical, like she had been lectured into who she was, her personal history memorized but not lived. She had memories, some crystal clear, some faded, but there were gaps. Big gaps.

“Oh God. What happened?” She asked, but there was no one to answer her. Shaking, she ran her hands through her hair, feeling the strands between her fingers. She had to calm down. Deep breaths helped, and a few minutes later she wasn’t panicking anymore.

She was still scared. She didn’t remember things. But she could think about that rationally. Humans didn’t remember everything. In fact, she told herself, most memories people claimed they had were reconstructions made by the brain, filling the holes with what people wanted to remember.

But people didn’t feel like did now, or at least she didn’t remember feeling her memories like she did now, like she could leaf through them as if they were a book. She frowned. The last minutes, she remembered in absolute and clear detail. The rest of her life, not so much. And whatever had happened just before these moments…She shuddered. Fractured bits and pieces. Like someone had crushed the memory, tried to remove it.

From what she remembered…

_Bonesaw_  
 _neurons dendrites connections_  
 _cannisters of fluid_  
 _fear_

… she’d probably be the one to do it.

She stopped thinking about that, forcefully rerouting her thoughts from what she remembered to how she remembered. Had she triggered again? Gained another power? She had heard things, she knew she had heard things, about second triggers. An ongoing debate if second triggers really happened or if it was just surpassing the Manton effect. Victoria

_angry shout_

Victoria had mentioned that from the courses she attended to at the University. Maybe it was something like that. She didn’t remember the exact moment of her trigger event, parahumans didn’t, but the last memories before this felt like that, somewhat. It was hard to compare what she didn’t remember.

It wasn’t just her memories. She could feel herself, feel her body like she did when she touched somebody else, and it was different. Beyond the fact that she could sense herself, when she was immune to her own power. Her cells felt different. More plastic, mutable. Her DNA like it was at the tip of her tongue, ready to be unleashed. She felt like she could shape all of it.

Everything was instinctive, yet simultaneously precise and deliberate. She didn’t dare look closer at her cells, her proteins and her biochemistry, fearing what she might find changed. And how it might be changed. Inhuman.

She licked her dry lips. With a sort of morbid curiosity, she willed the flesh.  _Be more_. She clenched her fist and the muscles bulged, grew, the veins red and visible before the flesh warped and integrated them, nails growing into claws and extending into her flesh…

She stopped. Opened her hand and watched it return to normal, not on its own but willed by her panic, in the span of a second. Her breathing was still steady, like nothing had happened.

She had no words.

Shell-shocked, she wondered if her power still worked, if she could heal and

_body organ tissue cell_  
 _horror hatred_  
 _blood muscles tendons sever_  
 _kill brain_  
 _never_  
 _too late_

She couldn’t. She couldn’t do that anymore. She didn’t  _want to_  and she  _wouldn’t_  because she  _couldn’t_. Her powers had turned inwards and it was  _better_ , and she was crying even though that was a waste of fluids. She ignored the prickling across her skin, the microorganisms and dust mites. Her backpack had one broken strap and her cap was lying in the water just ahead. She grabbed them and ran.

She didn’t remember what happened, but she remembered what it felt like. Guilt, despair, fear, horror. She had to get away, had to make amends for something, somehow.

Because she was one of them now. A monster.


	2. Chapter 2

Standing in front of the apartment’s door, she hesitated. It was useless hesitation. She had to, or she would spend the night on the streets.

So Amy knocked.

A tense minute later, a gruff voice answered through the wood. “Who is it?”

She hesitated again. There was hostility in his voice. Not unusual these days, and even less considering it was well past curfew. “It’s Amy. I’m a friend of Daniella.”

Inside, there was a gasp, a hushed conversation. She thought she heard her name once or twice, but didn’t strain her ears. Then Daniella opened the door and gasped loudly. She didn’t blame her, she probably looked awful, wet as she was. Her hands flew to her mouth. “Amy! What happened?”

She wasn’t sure of how to answer her schoolmate. She didn’t remember most of it, and telling her she’d become a monster… was not a good idea. She shrugged helplessly, trying to avoid the subject and not looking anyone in the eyes. “There was… trouble at home.” An understatement, but also the truth. “I needed some space and… and some place to stay for tonight. I thought…” She trailed off. The truth was she hadn’t had time for friends ever since she gained her powers. She knew she had pushed people away to make more time to help people, at least. So suddenly appearing and asking for someplace to sleep? Maybe she hadn’t been thinking after all.

The last time she’d been to Daniella’s house had been over a year ago. The taller girl was friends with both herself and her sister and well as her cousin. No doubt because she was one of the most warm human beings Amy knew, always ready to help and support others. That was why she’d jumped to the forefront of her mind when shelter had become a question.

True to her nature, Daniella was not having any of her hesitations. People clung together in the aftermath of Leviathan, and while some closed themselves off, others opened their doors to others. She reached for Amy’s hands. “Of course you can! We-”

_Daniella Sabin – skin muscle fat bones conne_

As soon as she made skin contact, the freckled girl flinched violently and pulled away. Daniella stared for a second, alarm on her features. She turned back to her father. “We still have space, don’t we?”

The older man nodded, leaning against the doorframe with his eyes on Amy. “On the floor, or in your room. She can always take the couch.”

Daniella flashed a smile a Amy and waved her in. Amy herself hesitated and reassured the father. “Thank you Mr. Sabin. It’s just for tonight, I promise.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He dismissed her worries. “We couldn’t just let you stay out there.”

Daniella led Amy in, introducing her to her relatives. The apartment was crowded. Her uncle and his family were staying there too, she explained, since the waves had completely smashed their house. She chattered, trying to make conversation. Amy tried to evade the questions about her family and herself. There had been nothing good on her front lately.

Fortunately, Daniella’s mother sensed how uncomfortable the attempt at a conversation was being for both of them and intervened. “Are you hungry dear? I can prepare something while you get out of those clothes, you must be freezing.”

Amy wasn’t. Not hungry, not cold, not tired. That had been the thing that broke her out of her panic, realizing she wasn’t getting tired. She was stuck into a neutral state of being she couldn’t put in words. Like her memory, the sensation of temperature was more academical than anything, and she didn’t feel any hunger or thirst. Her muscles didn’t feel tired, and didn’t start hurting with the exertion either. Running for so long had hurt her feet but as soon as she stopped, she’d focused on the cells without thinking and what little damage they had was healed. The whole thing was so fast it could be called unconscious, involuntary, but Amy remembered everything she did now.

“I don’t want to impose any more than I’m already…” It seemed weak even to her own ears. And it would be suspicious if she didn’t eat or change her clothes.

Ms. Sabin waved her concerns off. “Nonsense. Go change, I’ll have something for you in a minute.”

“Then, thank you.”

She was shown where the bathroom was and Daniella helpfully informed her that power wasn’t a concern ever since the weekend, so she could have her things dry by the heater. Alone once again, Amy wondered if a roof over her head was worth dealing with all the people. She could tell they thought something bad had happened to her. Not that they were wrong, but it certainly wasn’t whatever they were thinking. Not from what…

_goodbye love_

Amy shook her head. Not going there. Not again.

Some clothes in the duffel bag were wet from when it had been on the water, but nothing much. The memory card was safe, although she couldn’t remember whatever was in there. She’d have to find a computer to check it out. The scrapbook however, was a loss, barely anything legible in it. She leafed through it, knowing that just looking at each page would engrave it in her memory. She would think about it later. The clothes she was wearing weren’t damaged enough she had to get rid of them, so she hung them out to dry.

Five minutes after Daniella had left her, Amy returned to the kitchen, looking more like herself. There was a full plate with rice, meat and vegetables laid out for her. Touched by the gesture, even if misguided, Amy managed a smile and sat down. Only when she took the first bite did she realize something very important, and very inconvenient.

She could feel her body, and that included everything inside her body. The feeling of organic matter not part of her sliding down her throat was… very weird, creepy. Disturbing was a good descriptor.

She couldn’t stop now though, not without worrying both Daniella, her mother and her aunt, the three of them surreptitiously watching her. Or worse, offending them. Instead, she started eating faster, wolfing down the food. The sooner she could finish eating, the sooner she could think of other things beyond the very uncomfortable feeling.

It seemed to mollify their worries, so she counted it as a victory. Besides, the whole atmosphere was lighter in the overcrowded apartment, in contrast to the stifling feeling of her own home for the past month. It felt better. So of course it didn’t last long.

“Do you want to call your house?” Risked Ms Sabin. “Let them know you’re here?”

The fork stopped on the way to her mouth, Amy’s body locking. No movements. She even stopped breathing. Fear paralyzed her.

_Carol? it’s me_

“No.” She forced the words out past her throat. “There’s no need.”

There was silence for the rest of the meal.

“You could stay in my room, the bed’s big enough.” Offered Daniella.

Amy shook her head. “No. I’ll take the floor.” She had insisted and gotten some blankets and a cover, and it was enough. She doubted a hard floor would bother her much now. They said their goodnights, prepared the couches and mattresses for those without their own beds and turned off the lights.

Amy settled in to sleep, curling into the blankets more for comfort than any need of warmth. She steadied her breathing, closed her eyes and tried to think of nothing.

Five minutes passed…  
Fifteen minutes passed…  
Thirty minutes passed…

She opened her eyes, feeling like another part of her humanity had been stomped on and killed. Messily.

She couldn’t sleep.

She couldn’t worry to exhaustion, something that had become the norm after the pressure had started to pile up. She didn’t get tired. She couldn’t think about nothing and drift off. She was always feeling her body in minute detail. She couldn’t even force herself to sleep using her power. Her mind ‘awoke’ her the very instant she succeeded.

At least she’d be free from nightmares, she tried telling herself. She spent some time digesting the fact that she couldn’t sleep, and more time thinking about how she felt about that. There was some fear, about what was happening to her, some horror too, but it was detached. There was… acceptance. She was a monster and now her body was fitting into that image too. In the dead of night, without people around her, it was easier to accept that reality. When she wasn’t alone…

_family_   
_hurt_   
_fear_

When she wasn’t alone she felt the people around her, their bodies

_Daniella Sabin – epithelial tissues connective tissues muscular tissues nervous tis_

She broke off that chain of thought with the ease born of long practice and elected instead to think of what the inability of sleep meant for her future. Amy knew some capes didn’t sleep, such as Miss Militia. How did they cope with all the extra time? She suddenly had several hours until sunrise, even more until somebody woke up.

“Damn it.” She whispered. She was tempted to ask herself what she had done to deserve it, but the possibility of getting an answer scared her too much. She couldn’t afford to dwell on memories because none of them would distract her enough. Not the good ones at least. It said something about her that most of her actual memories weren’t good.

In the end, it all came back to her power.

No matter what, she was feeling her body. It was constantly in her mind’s eye, more than just a wireframe or three-dimensional model, but a complete map and knowledge of her body. Without nothing else to focus on, it was inevitable it caught her attention.

When somebody started thinking about the simple unconscious act of breathing, they became aware of it. And then they had to start thinking about each breath, otherwise they’d stop breathing. Most unconscious things were like that. Pay some attention to them and suddenly attention is needed.

But Amy wasn’t just aware of her unconscious actions. She was also aware, and in control, of the reflexive actions of her body. She was thinking about the beating of her heart, the way her lungs expanded with each breath, the muscles of her stomach walls rolling. And smaller things: muscles around veins, cellular division, energy being processed in her mitochondrions.

Awareness of what she was doing, perfect knowledge of what she had been doing from the moment she awoke face down on the asphalt. And control over it all.

There were redundant things she didn’t  _need_. Fragile organs that could be  _strengthened_. More  _efficient_  shapes and reactions.

“No.”

She steered herself away from those lines of thought and settled for thinking of the food in her belly. It was organic matter, but long since dead. She couldn’t ‘see’ it. The result was the disturbing sensation of having something jammed inside of her that didn’t belong to herself. She paused, reviewed that thought. Then she told herself to forget about it, even knowing she couldn’t anymore. Either way, she couldn’t affect the organic matter because it was dead. She had something dead inside of her. She shuddered a bit.

She knew she had unconsciously started digesting it, she remembered that. But the process was too slow. A full meal took two to three days to exit the digestive tract. Days in which she would be feeling it slowly being broken down in her body. A constant thing inside of her, a nagging feeling that would not go away. It was not an appealing prospect. But she could make it faster.

Amy stopped. What she was thinking about, it was like opening a door, like Marquis.

_neuron connections_

She wouldn’t be able to close it after it was open. A part of her was afraid, afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop after taking the first step, not until she was running and hurting people. A greater part remembered everything but the moment she had become a monster, and it told her the door was  _already_  open.

She decided.

Carefully, she willed herself, her flesh, her cells. One word for a process that could last over twenty-four hours.  _Consume_.

It was fast, like she wished. Her cells moved. Pseudopods extended. Tendrils. Chemicals were processed and the matter was broken down. All of it, even compounds that humans usually couldn’t digest. Cellulose, fibers. The required enzymes were polymerized. Then it was absorbed and distributed into the bloodstream. It all took two seconds.

Amy stared unseeing at the ceiling, her focus turned inwards. The speed at which she had changed, consumed the food, it was dizzying. All that organic matter, just gone, incorporated into her. She didn’t even need a digestive system anymore, nor, she suspected, a urinary system. Her body was too efficient for that. The change was scary. She was scaring herself. The moniker floated through her mind again, this time even more appropriate than before.

Monster.

She had nothing inside her now, and she felt… less empty, perhaps. The sensation was unlike anything she had ever felt before. On the physical side, though, she was very much emptier than before. The consumption had ‘eaten’ all the organic matter inside of her, and not even the usual benevolent bacterias that inhabited the human body. No. She searched through her memories, she hadn’t had any microscopic life inside of her ever since she awoke. Had it been a side-effect of her powers inverting? The ripped clothes too, by the way. The way her body had changed, it could have wiped out the bacterial life. Or it could simply be she never had any, even before. Her powers could have dealt with it passively, the same way she never got sick.

She sat on the blankets, trying her best to just ignore what had happened. Her trains of thought were always coming back to her body and her power, while they were definitely the last things she wanted to think about in depth. A look at her watch showed she’d been thinking for a mere half an hour. So she still had the whole night ahead of her. No such luck on that side then. She had to distract herself somehow.

Her eyes roved across the living room. There was a bookshelf, filled with books and DVDs. Amy thought about it for an instant. Then she got up, tip-toed to it and tried to read the spines in the darkness. She picked the biggest book that wasn’t a dictionary and sat back down on her borrowed blankets. The old leather cover of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare felt soft under her fingers. It was an old book, probably passed down to Daniella’s parents.

It was also too dark to read it, regardless of the slivers of moonlight that passed through the closed windows. She contemplated the possibility of not doing anything, spending the rest of night inside of her own head. It was a far more horrifying option than the other thing she could do.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Amy whispered to herself, a bitter smile on her lips.

She focused on her eyes and willed  _Change_.


	3. Chapter 3

There was no way to stop thinking about what was truly important. Distractions were precisely that, distractions, mere stopgap measures. Sooner rather than later, the unwelcome thoughts bubbled to the surface, crying for attention.

There were the facts: She was a monster. And she didn’t know what to do now.

The how or why were, thankfully, beyond her reach and therefore irrelevant. What mattered was whatever path she would take from here.

Amy had spent her life trying to be good. It was doomed from the beginning, maybe, and misguided, perhaps, trying to gain her family’s approval, but she had tried. She had tried harder than many others, pushed herself until she couldn’t anymore and then kept on going. Her efforts had backfired, wearing her down to her bones, numb and cold towards to the suffering of others. She was a monster in spirit, and in body too, if her new abilities were anything to go by. But she had never wanted to be one. Call it stubbornness or ingrained uprising, but she still wanted to be a good person.

Which clashed with the fact that she wasn’t. Just the opposite in fact. Just as ingrained in her psyche as her need to be good was the fact that she was a monster. Something lower than scum, worse than her father had ever been, so bad it could hardly be called human. She couldn’t even remember why but she  _knew it_.

_fear horror guilt despair_   
_blame_   
_monster_

Did feeling guilt and regret make someone less of a monster? Not according to Amy.

The only possible way was to try and atone for it. Somehow. She not only didn’t remember what she wanted to atone for, she also couldn’t heal anymore. And as much as a blessing it sounded, to her own detached horror; it also left her without an easy way to make amends.

She had been without direction or ideas, but breakfast had given her one avenue she could explore until she figured out what to do later. Daniella’s uncle was currently working on the clean-up crews. Nine hours a day for twenty dollars and all three meals. Anonymous and without strings attached, simple work for simple rewards. It was all she could have wanted.

She suspected she could go without food if she worked on her metabolism, but while yesterday’s experiences had been unsettling, they weren’t enough to make her reject the offer. It offered a semblance of normalcy. The money was always useful, of course. But the real attraction had been the opportunity to do something for the city. Something good.

The fact that nobody would look for Amy Dallon, a.k.a. Panacea, in the groups that handled the manual labor was just a very big bonus.

She would have to work in close proximity to a lot of people. Make contact with many, probably. But she could deal with it. She had to start somewhere.

So here she was, on the line to sign up with the cleaning crews for the day. She’d chosen the ones on the Docks, further away from the areas she knew and was known. Sabin himself was working on eastern downtown.

The man in charge was marking down names. He was tall, lanky, but had the air around him of somebody who was in charge. Come her turn he paused just a second. Not surprising, and not the first one either. She was obviously young, not to mention short and mousy. It didn’t inspire much confidence in her abilities, but in the state the city was no one said anything. Who knew what her reasons were?

“First time?” He asked. She nodded and he frowned just a bit. “Are you sure you can handle it? It’s hard work.”

“I’m stronger than what I look.” And she really was. Not only would she not get tired, she wouldn’t get hurt either. And on her way, she had made just the slightest of changes on her muscles. She had been paradoxically unsurprised by the lack of damage she should have found on her tissues, so she took it just a bit further and added some more muscle mass, made the whole more efficient and powerful. Not more than the grown men around her, she wagered. Human, just a little bit stronger.

“All right, name?”

She couldn’t give her actual name, but

_Amelia Claire Lavere, you are in trouble young lady._

One of her first memories, reduced to sounds and blurs. She wouldn’t have remembered it before.

“A… Claire. Claire Lavere.”

“Right.” He marked her down. “Do you know the rules?”

“No slacking off or fooling around.”

He pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Or no pay. At the end of day I’ll call people one by one and that’s when you receive the money. I’m Danny. You join…” He looked over his shoulder and pointed at a jovial group with a mix of people from burly men to thin women. Some children were thrown into the mix too. “The guys over there. You can ask Kurt for any additional details.” He offered his hand and she shook it.

_Danny – epidermis dermis hypodermi_

She broke contact as soon as she could, abruptly. Danny looked at her strangely but didn’t comment. “Next!”

And that was that. Her first step towards… something better.

*

Working at rubble clean-up was surprisingly not boring at all. Their group had been tasked with removing smaller debris from the street, piling it up in trucks and carts to be dumped at the beach for the most part. It was picking up stone and mortar here, putting the random bit of wood aside, clearing a path for the water to flow down to the beach. Monotonous work. But people talked. They shared stories and worries, debated and complained. The city, the government, the gangs, rumors and hearsay, the  _fucking_  Endbringers.

Amy listened, mostly. She hadn’t been out of the house and in the streets since the attack. Even before, she mostly stuck to the hospital. This was refreshing. She wasn’t the only quiet one and the louder people talked instead. The group leader Kurt was one of those. He talked and directed them, seemingly untiring and utterly unconcerned about what people thought of him when he laughed out loud or grilled someone about something.

The sun was directly over their heads when he whistled sharply and took them back to where they’d signed up. Lunch time he said.

Plate with a bland meal in hand, Amy looked for an isolated spot. There were scores of people, younger and older, men and women. Few spots were free. After a good five minutes standing in the same place, she finally chose an empty windowsill to sit on. Sitting and eating, she roamed her eyes through the crowd, just watching the different groups. In her head, she went over Romeo and Juliet.

What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?  
Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.

Somebody greeted her, close enough that she could hear it over the crowd’s background noise. “Claire.” She recognized the voice instantly. It was Danny, from that morning. The tall man was making his way towards her.

Amy lifted her hand and mumbled a greeting. She tried to figure out why was he coming to her. She doubted he had figured out who she was. Had he come to check on her because of her age? Or because of her behavior? Avoiding physical contact with people was necessary, but her flinches drew odd looks. Or knowing looks. She was sure at least four people had their eyes on her, assessing her. Concern, pity, sadness… She couldn’t tell but it was getting annoying. She didn’t need it.

She was a monster. The last thing they should be doing was feeling  _sorry_  for her.

Danny obviously fell into the worried category. He leaned against the wall the window had previously been in and tried to strike a conversation. It was a terribly awkward exchange.

“How’s the food?”

“Good.” It was digested before it reached her stomach, consumed by the cells in her esophagus.

“Did the work go well? Kurt had nothing but glowing praise.” So he had checked on her with her supervisor.

“I really am stronger than what I look.” She could match the men in strength, she was certain now. She had to be careful with using her full strength in front of others. She had to brush off a couple of remarks with excuses about regular exercising. “It went well. They gave us gloves and boots, but they’re a bit oversized.” Amy doubted Danny didn’t know that, since he was in charge around here.

“Yes, one size-only I’m afraid.” There was another awkward pause. “Isn’t the sweatshirt a bit too much for the weather though?” He wondered whether she was sick or not.

“Not really.” She’d gone with long sleeves because they covered more skin and prevented accidental brushes with skin. But it was odd, especially with the hot temperatures. There was also the fact she didn’t sweat anymore. It would become noticeable that she didn’t, especially if she didn’t show signs of fatigue for long periods of time. “Well, not yet. I’ll change later.”

“Okay.” Danny fidgeted slightly. Amy was so still it seemed unnatural. “How old are you again?”

“Seventeen.” In October only, but Danny didn’t need to know that. And it was getting a bit personal. She could understand that he was worried, but she didn’t want people prying. She didn’t force the defensiveness in her voice. “Why are you asking?”

Danny backpedaled verbally. “I’m sorry.” He smiled, but it was strained. “I just have a daughter almost your age. You remind me of her.”

Family. “Ah.” She couldn’t say anything. Her shoulders hunched and she forced them to relax. She’d left the Dallons because

_fear_   
_betrayal_   
_guilt_

For their own good, because she didn’t deserve them. She doubted Danny’s daughter had the same troubles as she. “Worried about her?” She settled on asking.

Danny hung his head, silent for a moment. “Terribly.” He looked towards the sky, getting more overcast as the time passed. His voice was sad. “But she’s old enough. Parents have to trust their children to do what they want to as they grow up, no matter how much they worry. It’s hard.”

Amy got the implied message. “It’s fine, I…” She almost choked up. “don’t have a family anymore.”

Not one that wanted her anyway. She doubted even Marquis would want a monster like her. Leaving had been in everybody’s best interests.

“I’m sorry. For bringing it up.”

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t.

They spent some time just watching the gathered people eating their meals, in silence. Amy took in every detail, trying to drown her own thoughts.

Danny straightened up, getting ready to resume his post. “Just one more thing.” His voice got lower, more serious. “I got warned a while back, told to spread the word. It seems like the Slaughterhouse Nine are in Brockton Bay.”

_blonde hair in ringlets crusted blood scalpels_

Amy grit her teeth. “The Slaughterhouse Nine.” That was bad. Very, very bad. Because it was the Nine, not because she felt like jagged glass had been jammed into her brain.

“Yeah.” Danny continued, looking at her in concern. “That means… Shatterbird, and…” He left it hanging.

“I know.” She knew better than Danny or any of the people in the street. She had read information that wasn’t available to the general public. More than that, once she’d been called in to heal capes hurt when the Nine had passed through a city. The ones lucky to still be alive. Or unlucky, depending on how one saw it. “Thanks, for telling me.”

Amy wondered if New Wave knew about it already, then cleared them from her head. The break was ending and she had work to do.

It was the best for everybody.


	4. Chapter 4

The phone rang once, twice. She didn’t recognize the number. “Hello, Sarah Pelham speaking. Who is it?”  
  
“Hello. It’s Laura, Daniella’s mother?”  
  
She remembered the long-haired girl, a friend of Carol’s girls. The mother too, she knew, though they hadn’t spoken since well before Leviathan. “Laura! It’s been a while. How are things going?”  
  
“Yes, it has, hasn’t it? We’re good. Somehow.” Laura paused and Sarah readied herself for what always came next but she never managed to be prepared for. “I… I heard about Neil and Eric. How is Crystal?”  
  
Dealing. They all were. “As well as she can. It’s been… rough, for all of us. But it’s a reality we were all ready for.” No, it wasn’t. Sarah was spewing out acidic lies, propaganda, burning her own lips. Eric had been fifteen. Just fifteen, her son.  
  
“I’m sorry.” There was a pause. “Anyway, I was wondering if Amy was home?”  
  
Amy. Sarah straightened her spine, her whole attention shifting towards the phone call. Could she need Panacea? She said they were doing good, and it didn’t fit with what she knew of the woman. No. And she had called her, not Carol. “No, she’s not.” A brief moment of indecision. “There was an attack on Carol’s house and Amy ran away. We don’t know where she is. Have you seen her?”  
  
“Oh. Well…” Laura hesitated and some suspicion became more solid, settling heavily on her stomach. “She was here last night.”  
  
She’d been staying with friends, of course. Sarah felt like slapping herself. “At your house? Do you know where she is?”  
  
“No. She left this morning and didn’t come back. I wasn’t expecting her to, but I got worried. Decided it would be best to check if she’d gone home.”  
  
“Thank you so much. I’d rather give her some time to come back, but we’re all worried.” She said honestly. “Is there anything you could tell me? Anything at all that could help us find her?“  
  
“Well. She showed up after curfew. Soaked to the bone and… clothes all torn up. We thought she’d been attacked. Trouble at home, she said, so…”  
  
“There was a cape fight, yes.” But despite it being Bonesaw, Amy hadn’t gotten more than a few scratches. Sarah bit her lip, worried.  
  
“She was famished. I gave her dinner and then she spent the night. Insisted on taking the floor and everything.” Yes, that did sound like Amy. “She was so… so  _skittish_  I wasn’t going to insist too much. And this morning she just grabbed her things, thanked us and left after breakfast.”  
  
“I see.” Something had happened, it was clear and it only exacerbated Sarah’s worries. “Thanks again Laura, that’s really helpful.”  
  
“No, no, I’m just glad to be of help. If you find her…”  
  
“Sure. I’ll tell you when we find her.”  
  
She exchanged quick goodbyes and hung up. She finally had a lead. She’d call her sister first, then coordinate to call other people her adopted niece might be staying with. With any luck they’d find her. Then, Lady Photon would patrol the streets with Laserdream.  
  
With the momentum, the fact that she had forgotten to tell Laura about the Slaughterhouse Nine went unnoticed.  
  


*

  
A girl with red-streaked hair pursed her lips. Walking at her side, a bearded man noticed it.  
  
“Cherie, you’ve been awfully quiet.” He commented, idly playing with a switchblade. “Something caught your attention?”  
  
She smiled slowly, eyes focusing back on him. “Well Jack, one of the candidates  _changed_.” She stressed the last word. With a slithering of chains, one of her companions got closer to them, head tilting to the side. Mannequin. Cherish elaborated for him. “After Bonesaw talked to her, the scaredy cat ran away. The beloved sister followed and there was a very interesting talk…” Her smile widened at the memory of the conversation, a beacon to an empath as herself. The events had been really interesting to Cherish too. “She changed her sister and there lots of horror and guilt... And then I stopped feeling her.”  
  
“Eh!” A blonde child, hair styled in ringlets, protested from Jack’s left. “Amy didn’t die already, did she? I wanted her with us...” She whined. The black and white Siberian ran a hand through her curls soothingly.  
  
Cherish shook her head. “No, it was just for a while. But when I started feeling her again, she was different. She’s harder to feel now.”  
  
Bonesaw whooped with joy but Mannequin tilted his head in the other direction, questioning. The healer was of interest to him.  
  
“Yes.” Cherish paused, looking for a way to describe the tones of acceptance. “The scaredy cat used her claws. And with claws like that...” The perfect word occurred to her, one that was certainly running around the candidate’s head. “A cat can become a real monster.”  
  
That interested Jack. “Oh, so she’s becoming one of us now?”  
  
Cherish felt the muted melody of that mind, the calm that blanketed the fear and the vague self blame. The dwindling screeches of horror, lessening more and more as time passed. The lack of guilt concerning that incident, in which she’d copied Cherish own methods. “She’s  _certainly_  on the right path.”


	5. Chapter 5

During the two years Amy had spent helping at hospitals, she had heard many expletives and curses. In several languages. Some people reacted to pain by crying, others by staying as still as possible, and others by raging against it. Usually verbally.  
  
She used them all now as she paced on top of the roof. And for good reason.  
  
She had run out of  _books_.  
  
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me books! For I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave the mental exaltation. That is why I am quoting, and badly at that, the good Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Damn it.”  
  
A Sherlock Holmes novel was not enough for a night. Amy hadn’t read any of them yet, so when one of the volunteers had agreed to borrow her the first book, she had jumped at the chance. It was a good book, but without anything else to do she had finished it by midnight. And the closest library in the zone had been completely inundated during the attack, so she had not gotten any more books.  
  
Leaving her alone with her own mind. If only she could sleep, distract herself, anything!  
  
But no. Like Holmes, her mind didn’t lend itself to mental stagnation. It kept going. Thinking and thinking. Was it because of her power or just because Amy herself had too many things to think about? Too many things she didn’t want to think about, didn’t want plaguing her. A sword of Damocles hanging over her head. Not thinking about it wouldn’t make it go away. It was still there.  
  
“Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Just don’t think about it.” She raised her hands to massage her temples, a futile gesture now when she didn’t have headaches anymore. Not like before. It was just out of habit she did it. Maybe it was her way of subconsciously making herself more human, or was it...  
  
She shook her head. “I need more books. Now.” Leaving herself no more time to think, and wasn’t that a barrel of laughs, she started walking. Reaching the edge of the roof, she jumped and fell four floors down. There was no fear. Not only had Amy lost any fear of heights she might have with her sister’s flying, her body could take greater falls now. And any damage that she might receive, she could heal. She crouched and rolled as she landed, taking care to not trample her backpack.  
  
The impact didn’t hurt. She had disconnected her ability to feel pain while in the air. Pain was a defense mechanism, a way for the conscious thought to know that the body was damaged. But Amy  _knew_  her body like a blind man knows darkness, she didn’t need it.  _Mend_ , she willed as she rose to her feet, fixing the microfractures on her bones, the ruptured blood vessels and damaged muscles in her legs. She reconnected her sense of pain last. Humanized herself.  
  
She had taken residence on the roof of a mostly empty tenement building the day before and familiarity had her come back tonight. The cold didn’t bother her and it wasn’t wet. It was isolated and allowed her to keep an eye on the sky. On the way from the beach where the cleaning crews gathered, there were two former bookstores. It was there she was headed, with one of them in mind.  
  
It wasn’t right to take books from there, even if the shop was planked up and the combination of water and mold had likely ruined a great deal of the merchandise. Somebody had covered the windows and put a rusty padlock on the door, so the owner was likely alive. Or had been. It was looting, raiding. Wrong. But Amy needed to do something during the nights, or she would go mad. More mad. She was already on her way, anyway. It was just some books.  
  
And she would put the books back before breakfast, no harm done.  
  
The streets were empty. The only light came from the sky, little as it was. After making sure nobody was watching yet again, she gained some distance from the store’s door. Then she ran and kicked with all her strength. The door rattled heavily in its hinges and Amy nearly fell on her backside. She strained her ears, hoping nobody had heard the racket. It seemed she was in luck.  
  
“I’m still too afraid.” She sighed. She had all the strength of a full grown man and no problems with getting injured, but she still reacted like she was a girl on the small side. She took a deep breath.  
  
She snapped a side kick. The next kicks grew stronger each time, just a second between each as she healed the damage she did to herself. By the sixth, the door nearly broke by the doorknob. She aimed the seventh at the cracked zone, noting how she should have targeted the zone from the very beginning. The wood broke loudly, going apart in chunks around the lock, and the door swung open.  
  
Promising she would fix the door later, she stepped into the store. It was dark but it did not hinder her. She had changed her eyes for the first time two nights ago and now she remade them each night. More photosensitive cells, later a reflective layer inspired by a cat, more control over the pupil’s size… It had been something of an experiment before she balanced the cat low-light vision with the human detailed vision. She closed the door, keeping just a sliver open, because even cats needed some light. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as humid as she thought it would be. There were no puddles and the lowermost rows of books had been cleaned out. Yes, she could smell the mold from the wooden floorboards starting to rot, feel the cells and micro fragments against her skin and lungs. But aside that, it was in pretty good condition.  
  
She started at the classic’s section, looking for something substantial to read. Something that would last her for some time. Poetry maybe. She had always taken some time to analyze the verses. There was a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Interesting but much too heavy for her backpack. There were also thinner books; her eyes landed on ‘Poems by W. Shakespeare’ but she was fairly tired of his writing already. On the other hand, she was starting to sound really long-winded and eloquent, even in her thoughts. She grabbed a small collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and set towards the fiction for young adults. After skimming the summaries of a dozen or so books, she settled on a couple of fantasy ones. Norse runes and chinese dragons.  
  
She was sliding the second book out of it’s place in the shelf when she heard the noise. Something sharp and high. A whine… No. Like when chalk slid on the chalkboard the wrong way, threatening to deafen them at school.  
  
Her image on the glass protecting the books wavered minutely.  
  
 _That means... Shatterbird, and..._  
  
The counter had a glass pane. Half the cabinets and bookshelves in the bookstore had glass fronts, some broken, some intact. There was some sand swept against the corners of the room too. And the storefront had two great display windows that nearly ran from floor to ceiling.  
  
She was in a room with a multitude of glass panes and with the windows boarded up, it had nowhere to go but inwards.  
  
She threw her arms up to cover her head and herself to the ground as the glass  _screamed_.  
  


*

  
Awareness came before vision. Not too surprising. It felt its body and the visual sensory organs  
  
 _eyes_  
  
And the eyes were damaged. Lacerations and perforations everywhere. More than that. Foreign material was lodged in its body, the smaller fragments being pushed out by its regeneration alone. The bigger were being healed around, a temporary measure.  
  
Major muscular systems were cut, preventing movement. It needed to fix its arms to remove the bigger fragments of glass? Of glass. Its face had taken major damage but the brain was intact. No, the brain was intact now, the shards that had damaged it pushed back through the eyeholes in the skull. More worrying was the amount of damage and blood loss. It was drawing nutrients and material from the body’s stores of fat tissue, bit it would exhaust them. It would have to fill them up later.  
  
It could think about that later though. Regaining functionality was paramount.  
  
 _bicep tricep brachial artery lungs bronchus urinary bladder intestine appendix ovaries uterus fallopian tubes_  
  
She. It was female. She was. It-She should have remembered that.  
  
No. Not just. It was missing...  
  
 _me_  
  
Amy gasped. Awareness of a different sort flooded her. Awareness of herself, the person, not the body. Awareness that she had not been aware until that moment too. She stopped all the operations in her body and reconnected everything amiss in her brain in a blind panic and-  
  
 _Pain_. Pain unlike anything she had ever felt before. A strangled scream out of wet lungs reached her ears. Her own scream. She seized and more pain swept over her like a tidal wave. She was paralyzed, overwhelmed. Her body couldn’t move without hurting and her mind was trapped by the same.  
  
Amy had always reacted to pain by staying as still as possible and hoping it would pass soon. Being a good girl, no matter where which kind of pain it was.  
  
Infinitely long seconds passed. She cried. Instinctual hormone release, a way to ease and release the stress without moving. It hurt, the tears leaving her half torn out tear ducts, but eventually it abated. No, better to say she got used to it. It was still there, all the nerves red hot in her mind’s eye, throbbing and demanding attention. Haltingly, she reached for them before stopping and directing her attention closer to her brain. With a thought, the pain stopped.  
  
She breathed in relief. Her nerves lit like a christmas tree in her mind, but she felt no actual pain.  
  
Never again. Amy swore to herself she was never going to do that again. She couldn’t think with all the pain and without being able to think she couldn’t fix herself, she couldn’t even take away the pain. Maybe she should impose a pain threshold on herself. Some sort of protection, like a fuse or a circuit breaker.  
  
She spent the next minutes working over herself, meticulously going over her injuries like she was one of her patients. With care she unmade parts of her muscles and organs to fix other more important parts. Somewhat detachedly she removed the bigger fragments of glass, then picked the smaller ones out of her skin. She became able to blink, see and move again, and only then did she witness the destruction around her.  
  
The books were cut and torn, pieces of paper doting the room. There were red splatters everywhere, the books, the furniture, even the ceiling. Underneath her spread a dark stain on the wooden floor from where she had bled out. A million jagged pieces of glass, blades and needles and shards formed a shining carpet of deadly grass and a thousand more were stuck on the books and walls where they had found purchase.  
  
They had made mincemeat out of her. Amy Shish Kebab.  
  
She had the evidence all over her clothes, torn being use and darkened with copious amounts of vital fluids, but the true evidence laid inside her mind. She shook at the last memories she had before her brain was struck. She could review them in slow motion, like the news’ high-definition playback of a favorite touchdown. Better even. Human eyes and brains could process only a certain number of images per second; Amy’s enhanced eyes were somewhere between that and cat’s.  
  
The glass had exploded. Vibrated until it just burst apart with tremendous force. It rebounded on hard surfaces, stabbed the soft ones. It stabbed into her while she fell to the ground. She remembered the pain as veritable spears of glass from the display windows caught her sides and ran through her. The soundwave reached her before the glass stabbed into her eyes and bored into her brain. It was loud; loud and deep like standing right next to the bass columns on a live concert, a sound that had physical impact. She didn’t remember hitting the floor.  
  
“Ah-ah. I don’t remember.” Amy said out loud. It was important.  
  
This was the first thing she didn’t remember after her trigger. It made sense that she didn’t. Her brain had been damaged after all. But she was still alive, her power having recovered her and all of her memories and those were intact. Which meant her power worked even while she was completely out of commission and that it was automatic. But it was her awakening that sprung to attention. For moments she hadn’t known who or what she was, just like the first time. She had just been… not. She hadn’t felt _human_ , at least.  
  
She tried remembering what had transpired while she had been out but her mind refused to cooperate. These memories didn’t hurt like the others but they were reduced to minuscule flashes of information, useless all in all.  
  
Were the two situations related in some way? Had she been hurt too the first time and triggered again to survive? She groaned and shook her head. She shouldn’t dwell on that. She had other things to do. After all, Shatterbird had just-  
  
Amy froze.  
  
Shatterbird had just hit the city.  
  
“Oh. No.”  
  
She scrambled to her feet and lunged for the door, throwing it open. Under the moonlight, the city glittered with broken glass. Screams and moans heard over the distance, here and there, everywhere. The death toll had to be gruesome, the injured in the thousands. She started running. It wouldn’t help that the hospitals were overcrowded, undersupplied and understaffed after the Leviathan. They had also certainly been hit and...  
  
She stopped mid-stride.  
  
Where was she going? What was she going to do?  
  
What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t heal people. She would just be in the way. Maybe she could help and take people to the hospital or something. And have them bleed out in the way without proper care or… No, no. She was thinking too big. She wasn’t somebody who could help on a large scale or be helpful at the hospitals anymore. She had to scale down.  
  
Establishing priorities and compartmentalizing. The first thing they had told her when she had realized she didn’t have time to heal everybody.  
  
She could focus. Her priorities were her family, her friends, the heroes, the people. Personal feelings should be kept separate from doing the right thing, but Amy always had some difficulties on that front.  
  
New Wave first. They should be alright. If people on the street knew about the Slaughterhouse Nine, then the PRT knew too and they would inform Carol. So they should be safe. And it wasn’t like Amy could go back.  
  
Family, done. Friends…  
  
She ran down a short mental list. Most were not in town, she thought, and those that were… A name sprang to the forefront of her mind.  
  
“Oh no, no, no.”  
  
Daniella.  
  
Daniella, at whose house she’d been just the other night. Daniella who lived in a high-rise apartment with windows and a television and all sort of other things that could be affected by Shatterbird’s power.


	6. Chapter 6

Amy ran like she had never run before. She ran with single-minded focus, desperation of sorts driving her forward, propelling her through the streets. She had almost stopped and stumbled at the first few injured she had seen. Then she had steeled herself and moved forward. Tunnel-vision, only one goal in her mind. Get there.  
  
A little part of herself felt like it was breaking. But the truth was Amy was already broken and if she stopped now, she'd fall apart.  
  
Her path was direct, taking the least possible turns and the most straight runs. The streets' state didn't make it as clear cut as it seemed, but Amy didn't care. She waded through knee-high water barely slowing down, climbed chain-link fences and jumped over holes and obstructions with strength she shouldn't have in her limbs. She had to get there fast. She had to run quicker, jump higher, heal more.  
  
She had basically no reserves to draw from though. Already her new skin was thin and almost translucent, threatening to break under too much stress. So she started cannibalizing. She left her reproductive system intact, even now hesitant to touch it. She had other places to draw from. It wasn't like she needed all of her digestive track. Actually, she didn't need it, period. And she wasn't using her kidneys and urinary system either. Or liver, or pancreas, the list went on. Any cell in her body could handle the functions of all those systems by itself. She took small pieces of all of them, fueling the mass to her skin, her muscles, her bones, her lungs, arteries and veins. She would replace the lost parts later. Right now, she had no choice.  
  
She became faster, stronger, tougher.  
  
The buildings became taller and cleaner as she moved south. She whized past increasing numbers of people getting out into the streets and ambulances as the pavement got better. But the amount of blood-stained glass grew too. So did the number of victims, injured stumbling into the streets looking for help. Screams, moans, wails,  _pleas_. She didn't pay them attention, deliberately thinking only of the next step, the next place where she would put her foot, the next hurdle to overcome. She knew she would remember everything, down to every person who begged for her help, and that she would retain it forever. Something to assuage her guilty conscience.  
  
No, she had to focus. She was almost there.  
  
She could see the building now. She barely slowed down at all, only enough to not hit the inhabitants already down on the lobby. The noises of human pain increased with four walls to contain them. She galoped up the stairs, three steps at a time, twisting and turning to avoid collisions with the injured being dragged or dragging themselves downstairs. The landing she had hesitated in a couple of nights back was empty but for a middle-aged woman holding freely bleeding hands in a towel and standing on the doorstep of the other apartment.  
  
Amy barely saw her. Her attention was on the familiar door, closed shut. “The Sabins? Are they okay?”  
  
The woman, bleeding, scratched all over, turned doe-like large eyes towards her in shock. “I… I don’t know...” She continued even as Amy turned her back to her. “The door is closed.”  
  
Amy did not hesitate in using her strength anymore. She smashed her shoulder against the door, but unlike the bookstore’s this one was solid and sturdy. She hurt herself more than she managed anything. It didn’t stop her. She punched and kicked the door near the doorknob, hitting the metal once or twice, but never stopping. She was strong and the door would give in.  
  
A few people from the floors above and below gathered in the stairs, watching the girl throw herself at the door with a flurry of blows. There were dents in the wood already and cracks starting to appear. They were too scared to approach her and instead watched with disbelief and some horrid fascination. Amy didn’t pay them attention. All of her focus was on the door and on her limbs, healing them before they made contact with the wood again. A man came from below with a fireman’s axe, ready to take over her efforts.  
  
Too late. With a yell she smashed her foot against the door and it broke through it, trapping her foot on the other side. Instead of pulling back, Amy pushed, using her legs and hands to clear a hole large enough for her to slip through. Splinters of wood raked her skin, but didn’t draw blood, and ripped larger holes into her clothes. Behind her, someone was widening her entrance.  
  
The carpet was soaked red.  
  
There was a body in the hallway, where the father had collapsed on his way to the door. She ran up to him and touched him, for once wanting to use her sixth sense. He was still warm to the touch but in her mind she saw no hope. There were skin cells still alive beneath her fingers, but her awareness tapered off millimeters past the first layer. He was dead. A pile of organic matter, something she could use  
  
No, no, no, no, no!  
  
Amy backpedaled from the body, horrified. What had she been thinking?! Anybody else would feel sick, nauseated. She didn’t feel any of those things. If anything, she felt _hunger_.  
  
“Fuck! No. No, no,no!” She swore, shaking. She had to step away, refocus on something else. She had come here because she was worried. She had come here to check on her friend. She had come here to help. She stepped past the corpse and deeper into the apartment, very carefully avoiding touching or even looking at it.  
  
 _a spray of blood a small explosion_  
  
There were three more bodies in the rooms she checked. Everytime she touched them, she felt no more than a few living cells, diminishing by the minute. And always, the feeling, the macabre temptation. She didn’t linger in the rooms. Though she had long since gotten desensitized to the sight and smell of blood and human meat, tonight it repulsed her.  
  
No, she repulsed herself.  
  
 _Monster!_  
  
She checked Daniella’s room last. She wasn’t sure of why. There were memories there. Maybe it was because she already knew what she would find. Three bodies. They had died faster. Because they were smaller, maybe? There was a severed finger on the floor. An alarm clock had sent glass shards into Daniella’s face. It looked gruesome. And she couldn’t even console herself with the fact that they had died quickly. Choking on their own blood, bleeding out, massive punctures… Their rictus of pain were obvious.  
  
She didn’t loiter. She pushed her way past the couple of men that had followed her inside, and the ones that had stayed behind on the landing. Few tried to stop her and she ignored them all. She didn’t need to stay. Everything was already engraved in her memory. Nothing would erase them. She walked on, vaguely heading in the direction of the bookstore, where she had left her backpack. She pointedly ignored the sounds and sights of suffering and death.  
  
They were all dead. They had been for a while. There was nothing she could have done. Even if she still had her old healing powers, and it would have meant taking more time to reach them. It wasn’t her fault.  
  
“There was nothing I could do. Nothing.” She repeated it to herself under her breath, trying to convince herself. What did she feel, actually? Relief that it didn't fall on her shoulders? Or anger at her sheer helplessness in the situation?  
  
Amy didn’t know. She just wished she could  _forget_.  
  


*

  
Daniella had been one of the few whom she could absolutely call ‘friend’. She had not been afraid to approach the New Wave kids. She hadn’t tried to befriend them out of self-interest. Even though they could never be as close as normal friends, unable to truly comprehend what being a celebrity cape meant, she was still…  _There_. She was just nice. So rare a quality. Even after months of growing apart, Amy growing more and more tired and withdrawn as the pressure mounted, she had just welcomed her into her home.  
  
It boggled the mind. Amy couldn’t stop thinking about her and realized more and more how she hadn’t known her. Hadn’t appreciated her, so wrapped up in her own misery as she had been.  
  
She spent the twilight hours lost in memory. Whatever she could scrounge up from the recesses of her mind that featured her friend. The night and morning spent in the apartment, every little movement, every tired but genuine smile, the smells and tastes. She tried to recapture the atmosphere. There had been worry and acceptance and happiness. They had been happy she was there, with them, that she was well. And she had been happy to be with them too, hadn’t she?  
  
How long had it been since she had felt that way around someone who wasn’t her sister? And after Leviathan, even around Victoria?  
  
But whenever something outside the bookstore made more noise, inevitably a siren or a cry of some sort, the memories changed and she was back to the blood-stained carpet. And once there, the guilt hit her. It was  _almost_  enough to wish back her old powers. She had passed so many people while running. So many who needed a helping hand. So many that would die without medical attention. She could see every face, hear every supplication. But she hadn’t stopped. She had run away.  
  
And something rose within her. Something peculiar and oddly familiar amidst the guilt, despair and images of a bloody city reflected in a carpet of wicked glass.  
  
“Ah.”  
  
So this was hatred.  
  


*

  
Naturally, the next morning the relief crews were much reduced. Too many injured, too many  _dead_. Triple the work. A third of the workforce. Less than that, probably.  
  
If there was an upside to the situation at all, Amy thought, it was that there was now too much food for too little people. It meant she could ask for a second helping. And a third. She wolfed down the bland breakfast provided, uncaring of the stares she was attracting. It was unavoidable. All of her clothes were bloodstained to some degree, even the ones that had been in her backpack, but that wasn’t why she stood out. Everybody was a little bloodstained today. No, the matter was that  _only_  her clothes were damaged. Amy herself, Claire, wasn’t.  
  
No scratches or scars marred her skin. No bandages peeked from underneath clothes. If anything, she cut an even more imposing figure than before. Not hard, considering she was not imposing at all usually. A shy little thing. But the modifications she had made on herself during the night changed that. All of her major muscle groups were now noticeable. Not big but well-defined. So her arms looked like pure lean muscle in her t-shirt. And she didn’t have any extra mass to disguise it; in layman’s terms, no fat. An athlete-like look she hadn’t had twenty-four hours before.  
  
Also, she was hungry.  
  
Not in the traditional sense. Amy didn’t feel hunger anymore. But she felt, knew, the need for more nourishment, more nutrients, more building blocks. Her body had lost too much mass in Shatterbird’s demented version of a concert and then Amy had deliberately cannibalized parts of it to improve others and burned massive amounts of energy to do both that and highly intensive physical activities. At this point, she was contemplating absorbing the airborne microbes touching her skin to get the biomass she needed to feel comfortable.  
  
 _Daniella Sabin - carbohydrates proteins lipids nucleic acids_  
 _food_  
 _Monster_  
  
But she wasn’t going to.  
  
She wasn’t going to consume things other than normal food. She wasn’t going to eat living things. That would be one of her new rules. She needed new rules since her old ones didn’t translate really well into her current powerset.  
  
No killing with her powers.  
  
No consuming anything but regular food.  
  
New rules for new powers. Amy liked them. They were safe. They made people around her safer, they made Amy safer to be around.  
  
“Claire!” A by now familiar voice interrupted her musings.  
  
Danny Hebert had made it a point of eating his meals with her, or at least checking on her. It was nice of him, but not in an overbearing way. She turned in her seat to wave at him. Danny paused for a moment, looking at her. He’d noticed. Well, of course he had noticed! It was plain as day! Amy fervently prayed he wouldn’t ask questions because she wouldn’t be able to answer them.  
  
He sat down next to her and eyed her critically. “You’re not hurt.”  
  
Amy mumbled an affirmative. Danny himself clearly was. He moved cautiously and was probably in some pain. His arms and face had hospital staple adhesive coverings over a number of lacerations and what she presumed would be punctures. Most notably was the sutured cut that spanned the entirety of his ear.  
  
He smiled, sensing her discomfort. “You took precautions?”  
  
She felt herself relax. Danny wasn’t accusing her of anything. It had been just worry. “Yeah. I got lucky tho.” She explained. And without being able to help herself, she added. “Others not so much.”  
  
The older man glanced at the people around them with her. Like him, they were bandaged and treated, some more professionally than others. The most telling were the empty spaces. Only lightly injured were present because the worse cases couldn’t come.  
  
“Well…” He tried to continue, obviously searching for a topic that didn’t relate to the attack but not finding much success. “I’m just glad you’re not hurt.” He sounded sincere, but there was a sad edge to his voice. He noticed her look. “I’m just thinking about Taylor.” Oh yes, his daughter. The one ‘Claire’ reminded him of. “I saw her last night.”  
  
“That’s good.” Then she thought twice about it. “She’s not hurt, right?”  
  
He shook his head. “No. But she didn’t stay either.”  
  
Amy wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. If there was anything to say at all. She’d gathered he was single, so the loss had to be devastating. What could she say to a father who had his daughter taken away from him by the cruel winds of fate and his own actions? In hindsight, she didn’t want to think too much about it. It resonated just a bit too much with her familial situation.  
  
She settled for trying to distract the both of them with work. “So… What are we going to do today?”  
  
It worked. He explained how they would have to clean the glass still stuck on windows and sweep the streets. They couldn’t dump it in the beaches, so special dumping places were being organized. She should be careful while working in flooded streets, because the glass became nearly invisible while underwater but still cut as sharp as ever. They couldn’t start draining the streets without removing most of it either, lest it end up in the sea. In short, there was much to do.  
  
When the moment came for them to get to actual work, Danny left to organize said dumping sites and Amy gathered with everybody else. With the manpower constraints, they weren’t going to split into large groups like before, focussing instead on one zone at the time. She listened attentively to the safety instructions, mostly repeats of what Danny had said, and the way they were going to go through each street, starting away from the beaches.  
  
She was just getting the safety gloves and boots that Kurt was distributing when there was a shout behind her and the sounds of soft things hitting the ground. Like bodies. In the heightened awareness that came with adrenaline suddenly being dispensed, she clearly heard the soft rattling of chains and Kurt’s hushed but poignant:  
  
“Fuck.”  
  
A white figure, tall and ball-jointed, mocking the human form in its similarity. A blank face, devoid of lineaments, was turned towards her like it had eyes to stare with.  
  
Mannequin.


	7. Chapter 7

 

Everybody froze. For seconds, nobody dared to move, even holding their breath. The fame of Mannequin of the Slaughterhouse Nine was so great, his mere presence so overwhelming that he didn’t have to speak or move to command the attention of the crowd. He commanded their fates too.

Looking over her shoulder, frozen between the impulse to run and get some distance between her and the murdering cape and the impulse to stay still and hope he didn’t notice her, Amy frantically wondered why one of the Nine was here. He had no reason to, unless he felt like hindering the city’s reconstruction. It wasn’t unreasonable. Or, a louder part of her thought, he could be after her. Mannequin’s prefered prey were tinkers and people who tried to change the world for the better. Wasn’t she included in that category?  
  
Then, without warning, panic hit. One of the volunteers closer to him stumbled and turned to run, the first to regain his wits. It happened so fast Amy wasn’t sure if anyone but her registered everything in full. Mannequin’s arm wiped out, a chain extending from the ball joint that acted in place of his elbow and grabbed him by his neck. He reeled the man in, struggling and choking, until his arm reconnected and he could lift his victim into the air.  
  
A sick crack of bone and cartilage filled the silence. The dead weight of the body fell to the ground, splashing on mud. Mannequin lifted his other hand, index finger moving from one side to another like a pendulum. The message was clear.  
  
No running.  
  
The crowd shifted and rustled, the people on the fringes edging towards freedom, but nobody tried to run again. Fear, uncertainty and certainty alike paralyzed them. Fear and uncertainty for their lives, thought Amy, and the certainty of death. Logistically, it was impossible for Mannequin to stop them all from running. But it was sure he would get some of them, large numbers even. No one dared move first, for the fear of being the unlucky ones.  
  
Seemingly satisfied with their behavior, the madman in their midst nodded. He was still looking at her, she realized with a shiver. He grabbed one of the three policemen he had injured upon his entrance and hoisted her up by her neck too. Where they going to assist to another execution? The woman whimpered pitifully, shaking like a leaf. But it seemed her time hadn’t come just yet. Mannequin released his grip when she had her feet underneath her and steadied her with his right hand on her shoulder. It would almost pass as a supporting gesture if it wasn’t for the one doing it. With a flourish, his other hand twisted in its socket and like a magician, he suddenly had a rolled up paper between his fingers. He pressed it to her hands.  
  
Trembling, the woman took it and, eyes jumping between the slip of paper to her capture like a frightened rabbit’s, unfurled it. She looked once more at Mannequin, questions in her gaze. From her position, Amy noticed how the fabric moved under Mannequin’s fingers, subtly squeezing the hostage’s shoulder. Then, slowly and haltingly, she read from the note.  
  
“Sirs and Madams, the terms of engagement are as follows: One…”  
  
The Slaughterhouse Nine were recruiting. Eight rules followed in the letter to Brockton Bay’s residents, detailing the particulars of how the Nine would test their candidates. It was very business-like, almost  _pleasant_  in tone. Almost. The words spoke of ‘testing’, ‘removals’, ‘punishments’ and ‘penalizing’. Amy could imagine what the euphemisms hid.  
  
The woman finished reading the letter. Mannequin let them all process what had been said for a few seconds. He lifted his hand from her shoulder and, in a flash, a blade slid from the base of his palm and cut across her neck. The arterial spray left red droplets on his white surface. The second corpse hit the ground. He lifted one hand and very clearly pointed at Amy.  
  
Mannequin was here for her. To test her. She was a candidate for the Slaughterhouse Nine.  
  
 _Monster_  
  
How appropriate.  
  
She turned to face him fully. She had no idea what to do, but his business was with her, not Danny or Kurt or any of the volunteers here.  
  
Amy took in her surroundings in a serie of quick glances around. She didn’t even know if Mannequin could see her eyes, but he didn’t act like he was blind. They had gathered in the usual place, a waste ground between two sturdy tenements, a square little more than twenty meters across. The walls were covered in graffiti and the ground was a mix between dirt and cement, which ended as being just plain muddy. Slippery. The folding tables were all pushed against the left, near the van that brought the food. A pickup truck with equipment was parked on the right corner further away from the street. That was behind her. There were no alleys, no others means of escaping the terrain but through the street, which was mostly blocked by a chain fence.  
  
And Mannequin stood in front of the only exit.  
  
Her mind raced. What could she do? She had never fought before, lacking the inclination and will for it, and her knowledge of the act amounted to basic self-defense and watching the real pros from afar. No, she should start by what she knew.  
  
They were trapped with Mannequin. He had disabled the meager guards they had first. It couldn’t have been because they were a threat, there was no way they would manage to even scratch him. To scare them then? Take out the protectors to make the prey realize there is nothing they can do? A psychological attack. And it wasn’t like it didn’t fit with the Nine’s methods. But something nagged at her, some instinct that told her that there was something she was missing. Some hidden purpose in Mannequin’s actions. That was when she noticed the silence. There should have been some workers on the street, a few more police officers near the registration booth, that one vagrant that just sat and watched them eat without making trouble. The relief efforts were diminished today, but still everything was unnaturally too calm.  
  
Mannequin had isolated them. There was nobody to come to the rescue, because nobody was going to go and ask for help. And without cellphones or radio, the only way to communicate was face to face. It meant someone had to escape and run to get them help. Amy probably classified for a brute rating right now, but she was under no illusions that she could beat Mannequin. And stalling was useless when Mannequin had gained all the time in the world to test her.  
  
“Fuck.” She grit her teeth, moving to stand on the balls of her feet, legs bent and arms tense, ready to dodge at the first hostile movement. The first move was his.  
  
Mannequin lowered his arm and tilted his head. In curiosity? Questioningly? The puppet man could somehow convey an amazing range of emotions with body language only, but without speech it was still a limited form of communication. Was he asking her a question in his own way, or was he just observing her? And for that matter, how was he going to test her? Recalling what she knew from the Nine’s recruitment stints in other places, the only thing she be certain of was that it would be bloody.  
  
Her eyes flew to the rest of the clean-up crew around, pressed against the walls, fear in their eyes, trapped like animals in an abbatoir. And know she had another reason for Mannequin’s actions in confronting her in front of so many witnesses. So many _props_  for his performance. She had to protect them somehow. Find them a way to escape before Mannequin killed them all.  
  
Then a large hand closed over her shoulder and she was pulled back. Caught by surprise, she almost hurt Kurt as he stepped forward, deliberately putting her behind him. The large man was pale but still he moved to protect her. Then, in an admirable display of nerve and courage, he addressed Mannequin himself. Admirable, but futile. He got as far as opening his mouth.  
  
Mannequin tilted his head down and twisted. He was fast, going from nought to sixty in a second. The motion made his arms spin and without warning the right arm separated at the elbow, the forearm shooting forward. There was barely any time to react. It caught Kurt in the chest, sending him flying back and into Amy. But instead of being bowled over, the girl caught Kurt’s falling bulk with surprising ease, considering the man must have weighed two to three times as much as she. She pulled him back and down, out of the way. Where he had been struck, a red stain was spreading from a cut four centimeters wide and who knew how deep.  
  
“You can’t fight him.” She told him. He tried speaking and coughed, frothy blood spilling from his lips. His eyes widened as he realized he wasn’t able to breathe. Pulmonary bleeding. The blade, presumably the same that had slit the police woman's throat, had slid between his ribs and into his lung. Without medical assistance, he would die. Amy made up her mind, a plan emerging from her thoughts. She looked at the men and women standing around her. “Keep pressure on the wound or he will die.” She stood, not pausing to see if they would heed her words.  
  
They couldn’t fight him, but she could.  
  
In what was possibly the most reckless and idiotic move she had ever done, Amy charged Mannequin. It caught him by surprise. She crossed the twenty paces separating them in a sprint, throwing a punch as soon as she was in range. He dodged at the last minute, pivoting on one leg in a dizzying move. Between her momentum and the complete imbalance that punching while rushing put her in, Amy flew by him, missing by centimeters and heading on a direct collision course with the ground.  
  
He was fast, but so was she.  
  
She caught herself on her hands before she slammed on the earth. Digging in her fingers, she arrested her fall and coiled into herself like a spring. Her legs lashed out in a parody of a back kick, without anything that could even remotely be called technique, but with all the kicking power of an actual horse. She smiled as she felt herself hitting something, but it quickly faded when she realized the impact didn’t feel right. Thereupon Mannequin grabbed her by the ankle and sent her flying.  
  
So strong, she had time to think before she collided with the folded tables, breaking and denting some for sure. She took one second to mend the worst damage to her bones before standing up and glaring at Mannequin. He stood in his slightly hunched over way a few paces from where he had been before, head tilted. This time, Amy could recognize the puzzlement at her actions, the aggressiveness displayed by the pacifist healer, and the underlying curiosity as to why someone who avoided the frontlines was so strong. It seemed she had caught his full attention. Good. He turned his palms towards her and a pair of blades slid down from their bases, gleaming sharply. One was dulled red with blood. A challenge.  
  
A drop of rain from the murky sky above landed on her shoulder. She took off.  
  
She took care not to charge at full speed this time, opting for a more moderate approach. Although she had no experience in this regard, she knew it was possible for experienced fighters to herd their opponents in the directions they wanted. If she could push him away from the escape path, she could buy time for the others to run. It had been a long shot from the get-go and the more she tried to land a hit on her opponent, the more she realized that Mannequin held an overwhelming advantage on her just in sheer experience. Mannequin moved with the blows and trying to land a hit on him was like trying to hit water. Like the old cliché from martial arts films about the bamboo cane that bent but didn’t break, every time she made contact he slackened the chains connecting his joints, diffusing the force of her hits harmlessly. The terrain favored him too. She slipped in the mud easily whether he had deployed more blades, this time from his feet, to anchor him to the ground.  
  
Amy grunted as she was thrown again, bleeding from a deep stab on her arm. She had to get up swiftly, but taking care not to aggravate any injuries from the workers she had landed on. They cleared the space around her and once more she was going at Mannequin. She feinted left and punched with her right, trying to grab one of his arms. He evaded her easily and threw his hand in an arc aimed to cut her already injured arm. Amy didn’t bother side-stepping, stepping into the stroke instead and aiming a kick to his knee. He cut her arm, sending blood spraying and her blow connected. His leg bent unnaturally but he gave no sign of feeling it. Likewise, she sealed the veins and repaired the muscles damaged in the cut. There was no pause, because she was already punching him again.  
  
But not everything was arrayed against her. Amy could match him in speed if not sheer reflexes, and while she was lighter, her strength was on par with his. She had forced back the knee-jerk reaction to his attacks, letting him cut her, and immediately noticed something else that worked to her own benefit. Mannequin didn’t want to kill her. Without pain to be felt, she threw herself at him, dodging only the hits she could tell were aiming to incapacitate. As the fight progressed, they had grown in number.  
  
There was also another thing that ensured she would win.  
  
Abruptly, Mannequin stopped, taking a punch square to his abdomen without softening the blow. He stumbled back. His head snapped in the direction of the chain-link fence and the streets beyond. A man disappeared around the corner. Already three more were crossing the open gate at a run.  
  
He had become too embroiled in their duel.  
  
Some people had been inching towards the exit during the long seconds that ticked by as they fought, and now one had taken advantage of Mannequin’s focus on her to bolt for safety. More followed him. Mannequin turned his head back to her violently. Amy graced him with a mocking smile she wasn’t even sure he could perceive.  
  
Simultaneously, Mannequin turned to chase them and Amy launched herself at him in a desperate tackle. She bodychecked him into the ground, throwing her arms around him and clutching him like a limpet would a rock.  
  
“Run!” She yelled.  
  
Like a shot had gone off, the people moved. They scrambled to the exit, running, limping, carrying the wounded, all the while keeping a healthy distance from the entangled pair. She caught more than one grateful pair of eyes turning her way. Mannequin rose unsteadily. Amy twisted and turned, unbalancing and inconveniencing him. He couldn’t move effectively in her grasp. One of his arms was caught between her and his body, but the other was free. It rose and Mannequin stabbed down with it, this time not bothering to go non-lethal. The knife punched into her torso, breaking her bones, finding her lungs and the remains of her digestive system.  
  
“Claire!” Danny stood by the fence, watching horrified as a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine mauled the young woman.  
  
She gathered all the air she had in her lungs in a desperate scream. “Run!” He couldn’t die too. She tightened her arms around Mannequin’s white form, digging her heels on the ground. She wouldn’t let it happen again. “Don-” She gasped as the knife found her lung again and healed the breach hastily. “Worry! Run!”  
  
Mannequin couldn’t dislodge her. She felt no pain. She did not tire. Any injuries he inflicted she healed, in her alarm not bothering with anything but the essentials. Bone, muscle, lungs and circulation. She didn’t need any more to keep Mannequin in this place. To keep him from the workers.  
  
One misguided bastard came running towards them, shovel held high for a overhand smash. Lightning fast, he lashed out and the man doubled over, hands letting go of his improvised weapon to cover an ugly gut wound. Amy cried out in dismay.  
  
Mannequin retracted his blades, recognizing their lack of utility in this case. Then he forced his arms between their bodies, slowing working to get his forearms distended between the two of them. There was the sound of a canon or a thunderclap and Amy was falling, disoriented. She had let go of Mannequin? Her memories and her sense of herself reasserted themselves as she hit the ground and she realized he had shot her.  
  
She was losing blood fast. Hundreds of small metal pellets were inside her and she could trace the paths that hundreds more had taken through her body, leaving through her back. There was a crater in the front of her chest, raw and burned, hot gunpowder remains embedded in her skin. Her ribs and sternum were broken and caved in, her lungs heavily punctured sacks already filling with vital fluids. It took all she had to stop her diaphragm from spasming and worsening the situation. The rents on the outside skin were easily dealt with but the rest… She had lost too much mass. Her body had already cannibalized most of the useless organs in her torso. She didn’t have much to repair herself with.  
  
And she had no time.  
  
 _Dissolve._  
 _Transfer._  
 _Build._  
 _Heal._  
  
Amy cut corners. Bone could be replaced by cartilage. The surviving bits from her breasts were needed for that. There was no need for skin over muscle when she didn’t get sick. The lungs didn’t need all those lymph nodes when they could have more alveoles. The lymphatic system could go, point. The esophag got cut halfway down her throat, the remains of her stomach and intestines could be used elsewhere.  
  
She pushed herself to her elbows, going just slow enough that she wouldn’t tear the fragile incomplete tissues. Where was Mannequin? A body was thrown to the ground in front of her and she jumped involuntarily. Mannequin held his hands out in a pacifying gesture and stepped back, away from her and the man. He waved his hand in his direction, ushering her to take action.  
  
Amy had to be misinterpreting him. She had to, she begged herself even as she scrambled to the prone body. It was the same brave soul that had tried to help her. “You… You want me to  _heal_  him.”  
  
Mannequin nodded.  
  
“No…” She denied it. “You. You would just kill him after I did.”  
  
Mannequin shook his head and rose a hand to his chest, where a heart would be on a normal person. Like he had a heart. He wanted her to heal him. Really, he did, if she took his words for truth.  
  
“Ah.” She opened her mouth to get a reply out and found herself laughing softly. “Ah ah ah…” He wanted Panacea to heal the man. She looked down at the man, seeing him die slowly with both her eyes and her mind. How could she have ever deluded herself into thinking she could atone for anything? She couldn’t do  _shit_. She couldn’t even put this man out of his misery as he bleed out from a gut wound, an agonizing death. His murderer was standing back and looking at her almost expectantly. She wasn’t Panacea anymore. “I can’t.” The man stirred weakly, looking at her, begging, panic and terror in his eyes. “I can’t do that anymore.”  
  
Amy looked up and smiled, showing her blood-stained hands to the murderer. It was a broken smile. “I can’t.” They stayed like that as the man bleed and his eyes dimmed.  
  
Mannequin approached her then, casually. He twisted his forearm and a blade slid out.  
  
He was going to kill her. Could he, she asked herself? Maybe if she actively inhibited her regeneration, it would be possible. At that moment, she welcomed the thought.  
  
But he didn’t. He detached the knife with his other hand and held it out to her, kneeling so his head was more level with hers. After a moment, she took it. He got up and nodded, satisfied. Then he had his hand shoot up and grab the rim of one of the surrounding building. He reeled himself over the edge and disappeared.  
  
Amy still had her eyes fixed on the words inscribed on the blade when someone else arrived.  
  
PASS


	8. Chapter 8

They were hauling out corpses when they touched down. Bodies spread out where the ground was still dry, some laid out in neat rows, some just randomly placed, covered with what could be spared. Sarah, now Lady Photon, took a weary look around. It was a scene she was sure she would find repeated on nearly every street of Brockton Bay. If she still had tears to shed, she would weep them for her city, the place where she had been born and raised, and birthed and raised her children in.

Beside her, Laserdream bit her lip, searching the covered remains with anxious eyes. “Do you think…”

Lady Photon shook her head, did her best to conceal her worry from her already distressed daughter. “Maybe. Let’s hope for the best though. You know the floor?”

“Seventh. Left apartment.”

They entered the building, pausing once to talk to the worn-out woman that was seemingly in charge, awkwardly comforting a crying man that was nearly twice her size. She couldn’t tell them whether or not who had survived. There were a lot of bodies though, so probably not. The older hero promised to help transporting the most injured to an hospital after they were done. They flew up the stairs instead of disturbing the few pairs carrying down limp bodies. The seventh floor was a mess. Besides the ubiquitous glass, the door of the apartment on the left was utterly destroyed. A mess of wood chips and splinters was what remained from half the door, the other half still hanging by the hinges. Laserdream spotted the doorknob laying discarded on a corner.

The lady lethargically sweeping the mess into a corner stopped and stared at them. Her entire arms were bandaged or covered in recent scabs. When the two parahumans didn’t continue ascending the stairs, stopping on her floor, she spoke. “They’re dead.” She stated as a matter of fact, using her head to nod at the broken door. “All of them.”

Lady Photon hung her head, closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath to center herself. Another loss. Perhaps a greater loss than she would have ever expected. Behind her Laserdream turned her back and whimpered. “Oh, Dani…” Her mother composed herself quickly, but she hadn’t been holding onto much hope in the first time. Such thing was rare nowadays.

“I see. The bodies…?” She had to check whether or not there was an extra corpse. It made her gut clench.

“Still there.” The woman resumed her sweeping. “They’ll take them away too, I think.”

Before she could continue, a voice interrupted them. “What is going on… Oh.” A young man, maybe her son, came from within the apartment and startled when he realized just who his mother was talking to. “Wow. Hm. How can we help?”

Lady Photon allowed herself a brief smile. “We just came to check on some friends. If there’s anything we can do to help ourselves though, we’ll be glad to assist. Stay here, Laserdream?” She let her daughter to talk with the neighbours and moved into the apartment, dreading what she might find.

Blood and glass, of course. And seven corpses, covered by sheets, spread throughout the living space. She checked them all. She knew some faces, but none of them belonged to her niece. A palpable relief filled her chest along with accompanying guilt. She closed Laura’s eyes, remembering how not twenty four hours before they had talked to each other, and covered her head again. She lingered for a few more moments, unsure of what to do, yet again, and then left.

“She’s not here.” She whispered to Laserdream’s ear outside. “But your friend…”

“It’s okay.” The blonde shook her head, eyes dark. “I knew it was a possibility.”

“You know.” The young man from before started, eyeing their exchange curiously. “You’re not the first capes coming to that particular apartment.”

“The girl last night?” The woman asked him even as both superheroines turned to him.

“Had to be.” Seeing the looks pointed towards him, he knocked on the intact door behind him. “She tore through one of these with her bare fists. Kept on hitting it until it broke. If I tried a stunt like that, I’d break my hands. If she wasn’t a cape, I don’t know what kind of freak she was.”

Lady Photon furrowed her brow. “What did she look like?”

“Hm, hard to say… Average? Brown hair, freckles? I didn’t get a good look.” He shrugged, uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

Now frowning, she reached into a hidden pocket in her bodysuit and took out a folded photograph. She presented it to him. “Like this?”

He squinted. “Yeah, they do look alike. Except last night, well… She didn’t look that good. Blood and water and stuff…”

“Right. Thank you for your assistance. Laserdream, let’s go.” She said curtly and turned on her heel.

“Mom?” Laserdream looked at her eyes wide and confused, struggling to catch up to her as she descended the stairs. “What’s going on here? Was he talking about Amy?”

“I don’t know.” There was something she was missing here, intuition from over a decade of investigation and fights niggling in the back of her mind. “There’s something  _wrong_ with this whole picture. Let’s help these people and then we’ll check the other places.”

 

*

 

It had started raining. Skitter contemplated the weather with concealed irritation. The rain, light as it was, would hinder rebuilding efforts. At the very least, slow them down a little. But it wouldn’t slow down the Nine. Had it been stronger, it might at least have been an advantage against Burnscar. As it was, the drizzle was just plain _inconvenient_. It made it just slightly harder to move the bigger insects around and sent false alarms through her trip wires. Not damaging or encumbering, merely _annoying_.

Usually it wouldn’t have bothered her so, but Skitter’s nerves were already frayed. To her greater dismay, even her body seemed to be rebeling. She clenched her teeth to avoid yawning. The early warning system she’d devised was nearly done and she just needed one last pass through the streets with her flying bugs before they could move out to patrol the other’s territories.

No signs of Mannequin yet. She hoped it was not the worst case. That he had found a way around the silk lines. It should be impossible but, well… Tinker. Never-

A line was broken at the edge of her range. Then another. Something was moving towards them. Not somebody she had tagged. Skitter was already rising from her seat at the table, drawing looks from her teammates and subordinates. Flies on the disruption told her it was not him. Two individuals. Her insects relayed to her the texture of fabric, skin, hair. The Chosen? Another faction? Sending two individuals was hardly a declaration of war, but she did not relax.

Whoever they were, they were still running towards the center of her territory. Were they looking for her? Delivering a message, a threat, looking for a fight? Wanting help, a job? Either way, she had to deal with them.

“There are two men heading towards here. I’ll go check what they want.” She announced out loud.

Grue too rose and inquired. “After that, will we be done here?” She nodded. “Then I’ll get Bitch. We leave in fifteen, if that’s enough?”

She mentally calculated the time. “Should be.” With that they parted, Grue heading back to rouse their other teammate. She was just a little bit glad she didn’t have to deal with her, the air still tense between them. Skitter motioned to a girl in dreadlocks to follow her and strode out of the repurposed building. As she moved, more insects converged on her, crawling over her form, retreating to the compartments in her armour specific for them. They covered the brief shiver that raked her as the rain first hit her. She spoke calmly to the girl. “Genesis will stay here while we patrol. Contact me immediately if there’s any sign of the Nine while we’re gone. I’m leaving you and Charlotte in charge.” She continued with her instructions as she walked, outlining the measures and signals to be adopted.

As it turned out, they did not have to intercept the new arrivals themselves. Two members of the O’Daly family, cousins if she remembered it correctly, were stalling them, arguing loudly in the middle of the road. Now able to see them with her own eyes, she examined the ‘intruders’. They were garbed in working clothes and, as everybody in the city, exhibited some injuries. More importantly, one of them carried a specialized tool-belt, the kind used by the relief efforts contracted by the city. Skitter could guess who they were and where they had come from, but not why they were here.

All four of them stopped in their tracks when she came into view. “They want to speak with you.” One of hers told her after a brief pause, his eyes .

However, before he could step aside, one of the workers very nearly lunged forwards, a hopeful look in his eyes. “They say you fought Mannequin! Is it true?”

A cold pit started forming in her stomach. “I did.” But she had not won. Not really.

“You’ve got to help us!” He cried, gesturing wildly with thin arms. “He’s-”

Skitter had her swarm buzz loudly. This was going nowhere. She raised a hand and spoke calmly and evenly, not raising her voice. “Calm down. Explain from the beginning, quickly.”

The previously eager man took a step back in alarm and almost tripped over his own feet, but fortunately his companion came to the rescue. He was taller and broader across the shoulders, sporting an untidy stubble and sunken eyes. His voice was rough when he spoke, his breath short. “We’re from the relief efforts associated with the Docks, north of here. We got stationed near the old Market...”

“I know where.” She interrupted him, pressing him to get to the heart of the matter. Were the Nine baiting her? She resisted the urge to ask about the dock workers. Her father was part of those rebuilding efforts. She couldn’t afford to start worrying. Couldn’t afford to compromise herself. Dan Hebert should be home resting anyway.

“Right.” He licked his lips. “Bastard had us cornered like rats. Killed the cops and anybody who tried to run. Made Madi read some fucked-up rules. Then…” The man paused and shook his head. “He pointed at… a girl, some volunteer, I don’t know her name.”

Skitter was starting to get an idea of the situation. “The candidate?”

“Fuck if I know. Maybe? But she had to be a cape. Next thing I know the chief’s hurt and the girl’s charging at him. Charging!” He waved his hand around in disbelief. “Started fighting with him. Mannequin was trashing her but she just kept going at him. Over and over again. She bought us time to run. We came straight here. For all I know she’s still fighting him.” He stared at Skitter, pointedly keeping his eyes locked with the lenses of her mask. “ _Please_.”

Away from her physical location, her swarms were spelling words for Grue and Genesis, informing them of the situation. Mannequin had attacked north of their location. Testing, from the looks of it, the unknown sixth candidate. They needed to check it out before they were too late, and she needed the member of the Travelers ready with a form fit to fight off Mannequin.

They also needed more information. “What did she look like?”

“Short, brown-haired. Curly hair too. Just another girl, I don’t know.” He shook his head.

“She had freckles.” His previously hysterical partner interrupted him. All five present turned towards him. “What? She wasn’t hurt this morning. It was weird.”

Skitter nodded and started issuing orders. “Alright. Sierra. Get everybody out of the rain and hide. Spread people out through the buildings. Four or five spotters on the rooftops. If he appears, do not engage him. You’ll be killed.” She addressed the dockworkers. “If you want to stay, Sierra here will find a place for you. We’ll talk more later.”

Two four-legged creatures of bone and muscle skidded to a stop near her, startling those around her. Skitter had been tracking them through her insects, and accepted Lucy’s reins from Grue without breaking stride, mounting the monstrous dog in one step and jump. The entire movement made her joints and bruises scream in protest. And to think they could be facing the source of those pains in a few more minutes.

Grue spoke up, voice distorted behind his darkness. “Are you sure about this?”

She skirted around his worries. “Finding the sixth candidate is the priority. We need to gather as many as we can if we’re going to win Jack’s game.“ She spurred the dog under her. “If we manage to beat Mannequin, that would give us some time too.” She had little hopes on that front though, even with the dogs. “Where’s Bitch?”

Grue hesitated and Skitter felt the oncoming headache. They did not have _time_ for this. “Waiting ahead. Any idea of who it is?”

There weren’t many options. The sixth was a hero but for the life of her, Skitter couldn’t pin down which. From the physical description she would have guessed Panacea, but the powers pointed to a brute, maybe striker. Not to mention the location. Maybe a new player? “No, and we don’t have time to call Tattletale either.”

Any complaints Grue had he kept them in for the sake of expediency, but she could guess what he was thinking. They were going in as good as blind, walking right into a trap for all they knew, and she hated it as much as he did. The rain fell as a light drizzle now, cold, making her suit itch were the tiniest amounts of sand had gotten in but keeping her awake and alert. Their mounts ran and leaped as fast as cars, whipping her hair in the wind born of movement, but far faster than a car would be able to in the ruined streets of the Docks. They cleared debris and fences in one bound, running unhindered by shattered pavement, knee-deep water and sewage. The glass everywhere was a new feature though.

As they moved further and further away from the center of her territory, the streets degraded visibly. She felt an inkling of pride that her efforts were managing to better her people’s lives, draining the streets and cleaning out the buildings. Bugs swarmed over cement and asphalt, giving her an idea of the layout ahead of them. At the speed they were going though, she couldn’t order them to lay as many tripwires as she would have wished. Mannequin could probably slip by them easily.

And so he did, because as her senses extended to their destination, marked by recent destruction and still warm bodies, he was nowhere to be found. Flies and ants swarmed the zone in tidy lines, enough for Skitter to be aware of everything but hopefully not enough to scare away the candidate. Just a few moments before their group came into actual view of the place, she had a mental map constructed. There was evidence of a scuffle in the form of broken utilities and bodies, and the senseless destruction made Skitter’s blood boil. The Nine would not stop until they had their fill of _fun_ and she would be damned if she let that happen.

Their target was kneeling roughly on the center of the mostly empty field, slumping, a corpse in front of her, blood and mud around and on her. She held a knife loosely in her hands, her head down to look at it, noted Skitter, but the most attention grabbing feature was the raw flesh visible through the tatters of her shirt, spanning a good portion of her chest. They stopped their mounts just before the bent chain link fence isolating the area from the street and Grue traded a look with her, a tilt of his head towards the candidate telling her to take the lead. Skitter supposed he would be unduly intimidating indeed.

She had barely nudged Lucy forwards when the girl finally noticed them and snapped her head up. Skitter nearly recoiled, from the sudden motion as well as _recognition_. She had dismissed Panacea as an option because neither powers nor personality fit the image the runners had painted in her mind. And yet, the features were hers, down to the tired eyes. Not quite the same as she last remembered her, sure. She looked more than haggard. Thinner, ruined clothes hanging from her figure. Her hair was mostly undone from its ponytail, clinging to her face and neck along with blood and mud. But it was Amy Dallon.

Her expression shifted as she took them in. Brighter, but no less lost. The kind of look somebody about to throw themselves off a bridge would have.

“You’re missing Conquest. Where is the fourth?” Panacea shook her head and got up in a fluid movement that contrasted with the missing parts of her torso, muscle fascicles contracting and relaxing  visibly. She reversed her grip on the blade and brought her fists up in a loose guard position. “Nevermind.” 


	9. Chapter 9

Upon their horses sat the horsemen, the vanguard to the end, the harbingers of her last judgement. War. Famine. Death. Let them come, she thought as she stood. She’d fight, as War willed. She’d hunger then, as Famine willed. And she’d die, at last, as Death willed. The fourth mount strode bereft of its rider, Conquest, but that suited her just fine. She’d die unbowed and unbound, of her own free will.  
  
“Wait. We just came to talk.” The one in black and grey raised one hand, mollifying. Hadn’t Famine been the one who spoke? The divider of people, it who raised the price of bread but not of wine? Yes, she thought she remembered that, but the abstract knowledge could be wrong.  
  
“Like hell.” It didn’t matter whether Skitter spoke truths or not. She spoke too much. Talk, talk, talk, it didn’t matter if it was the bug-girl or  _her_ , Amy was done with it. She had had enough of words. Words had hurt Amy more than even Leviathan had ever managed to.  
  
 _Humiliation Shame Heartbreak_  
 _joy_  
 _What the hell did you do!?_  
 _Congratulations!_  
 _anger_  
  
 _pass_  
  
“I don’t want to hear it.” And who said the villain in front of her could be trusted in any way? The girl who wanted to be a hero and was a villain, running with her old teammates again. What had she done to be accepted again after such a betrayal?  
  
 _out of reach shouts_  
 _You can’t_  
  
“Panacea...”  
  
“Don’t call me that.” She growled out. Lies, lies and lies, nothing but lies she had woven over the years. Illusions in white, futile attempts at blinding herself from the evil within, at bleaching away the ugliness until she actually became what she said she was. They were lies because they hurt less than the truth, but like all lies, they were also fake. Inevitably the truth comes afore.  
  
 _PASS_  
  
Skitter was quiet for a few moments. “Grue, Bitch, give us some space, yeah? Check out the surroundings.“  
  
“Trouble?”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
Hellhound spurred her mount away without waiting for anything else to be said, Grue following after giving Skitter a nod. And the two of them were left alone. If Amy tensed much more, she would start shaking. Then Skitter dismounted and crossed over to Amy’s side, leaving the hellish dog behind the chain link fence.  
  
What? For a moment, Amy’s resolve faltered. What was Skitter doing? She couldn’t hurt her with her bugs, both of them knew that. More, Amy was actually capable of turning them against her. Amy caught up with her own thoughts the next instant. She couldn’t actually do that to Skitter’s insects anymore, although she could just beat her physically instead. But, she noted in a quick sweep of the battleground, the bug-girl was keeping all her minions at a respectful distance. She didn’t know about her second trigger then, secure in the knowledge that she could overwhelm her in a fight where Amy couldn’t make skin contact.  
  
Oh, how wrong she was.  
  
Or was she?  
  
 _she said she was a hero_  
 _planning from the start to betray her teammates_  
  
What if she knew? So many had seen her use her new powers to fight Mannequin, they could have told the Undersiders. Tattletale could have figured it out, would have figured it out. And unless they had specifically been looking for her, which wasn’t any better, the volunteers would have been to ones to call for help. So Skitter could know, she could even be here precisely because of that. All the precautions she was taking could be no precautions at all but ruses, designed to get her off guard. Amy could see the buffed up dog behind the villain. One bound would be all it took for it to reach her and Amy was certain that she didn’t have enough strength to beat one of Hellhound’s dogs when they were that big. Not to mention that Hellhound herself and Grue, the other two Undersiders surely ready to jump in at the slightest sign of trouble.  
  
Amy clenched her teeth. What was the correct option? What true and what was trickery? What should she do?  
  
No. She breathed in, then out, forcing herself to relax. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She didn’t feel pain. If anything, she  _wanted_ this fight. The possibility of paying back to the Undersiders even one tenth of the pain they had inflicted on her had been a pipe dream for months, a wild fantasy in which she showed them just how much it hurt. And now, regardless of consequences, she had that opportunity. She didn’t even have to make herself feel bad for wanting to hurt them anymore.  
  
She wasn’t trapped with Skitter, Skitter was trapped with  _her_.  
  
The black-clad girl stopped close enough for a conversation but outside Amy’s range. Previous range. “Is this better?” She kept her hands visible.  
  
Amy rolled her shoulders, loosening them. She had to get her head in the game. She adjusted her grip on the blade. “Like your teammates aren’t lurking around the corner. Or like the dog won’t jump me. Sure, it’s just fine.”  
  
Skitter ignored the dripping sarcasm and tried to placate her. “We didn’t come here to pick a fight.”  
  
“What if I feel like picking a fight?” She snapped back.  
  
Surprised or unnerved, Skitter was silent for a second before stating, calmly. “You wouldn’t win.”  
  
“Maybe,” Admitted Amy with a shrug. “but I’d hurt you enough before you put me down.”  
  
“We’re not here to put anybody down.” Skitter almost snapped. Her voice was level, controlled, but the swarm had buzzed, activity spiking. She had gotten to her. “Amy. I don’t know what what happened, but please...”  
  
“Oh, shut up.” She interrupted Skitter. “There’s nothing you can say that’ll change my mind so why don’t we just,” Already coiled, all Amy had to do was unleash the power of her rebuilt body. She lunged. “get down to it!”  
  
Same feint as with Mannequin. Nobody expected Panacea to initiate hostilities, not like this. Skitter managed to take half a step back and twist slightly out of the way, turning a full-bodied tackle into an awkward grapple. Amy’s weight itself wasn’t enough to send her down but the momentum was. They hit the ground, rolled, landed on a puddle, Amy half-splayed on top of Skitter, head just below the taller villain’s chest armour.  
  
The swarm around them spasmed, reaching for her before stopping and holding itself back. Oh well, better for her.  
  
She tried to straddle the struggling villain, sitting on her hips. It was hard, Skitter having size and weight on her. But Amy had pure strength on her side, an entire body built for the fight, all dedicated muscle and flexible tendons. It was optimized for a mobile fight, not a contest of strength, light and fast to match Mannequin. But still, it equalized things. With difficulty she managed to find leverage, toes digging in the mud, one hand digging into the curve of an armour plate and pressing down on Skitter's collarbone. She reared back, ready to strike with her right, the blade still held backwards in her grip.  
  
And then the monster dog bowled her over.  
  
Gigantic fangs clamped down on her arm, a canine as long as a short sword sinking into the flesh of her shoulder, and she was thrown away like a ragdoll. Or more appropriately, shaken like a dog's toy. The world blurred with the movement. All Amy had time for was gripping the villain under her, fingers tightening like a steel vice around her biceps, before becoming airborne. And Skitter along with her.  
  
They got shaken twice before the villain managed to snap out an order.  
  
"Lucy! Stop!"  
  
Almost comically, the dog's head stopped in its tracks. Both of them got slammed back on the ground, Amy managing to more or less keep her footing, but leaving Skitter in an awkward half-upright half-prone position. She didn't need enhanced hearing to catch the hiss that escaped the girl's lips behind the mask. Her eyes darted to where she still held Skitter, flesh deforming under her fingers. Amy didn't need skin contact to know some heavy bruising had to be forming under the black silken bodysuit. Her eyes moved up a fraction. Nor to see the way the shoulder was distended. Amy had locked her muscles on pure instinct and still gotten micro-tears; Skitter didn’t have that option.  
  
The former hero loosened her fingers, letting her fall to the ground, but caught herself before her free hand came up to her enemy’s neck, looking for bare skin. She couldn’t heal anymore. And it wasn’t like she wanted to heal her anyway. Amy adjusted her grip for a better grasp without pulling on the muscles. She'd almost let go. She caught Skitter’s eyes through the tinted lenses of her mask, the bugs usually crawling over it conspicuously absent. Had she been looking at her shoulder, where she should have been bleeding but wasn’t, the wound sealed almost immediately?  
  
Not breaking eye contact, Skitter rose, her arm still held loosely by Amy, and commanded the dog to let go with one word. "Off." The dog snarled very softly, a vocal rumble for its size, but opened the beartrap of its jaws nonetheless. The fangs left healed-over holes in the flesh that Amy didn’t bother closing. It was a tunnel burrowed into her flesh, but nothing more. “Are you hurt?”  
  
Amy blinked and raised an eyebrow at Skitter’s question. It was… rather surreal. She pointed it out. “Should you really be asking me that when you’re the one with a dislocated shoulder?”  
  
“It’s not…” Amy pulled the arm an inch to the left and Skitter winced. “... that. Bad.” Amy raised her remaining eyebrow, conveying how much she really believed that. She knew Skitter knew how much time she spent at hospitals. The girl wasn’t fooling anybody.  
  
They stood like that; the dog, Lucy, breathing down her neck. The tense silence stretched, stuck in an impasse. Was Skitter waiting for her to do something, thinking, about to speak, any thing? Was she actually in there at all, behind the mask? Amy wasn't going to let go, their positions the only thing that kept her from being dog food.  
  
Ten seconds slowly inched by.  
  
“Okay,  _fine_." Amy quit. Every second the bug girl spent eerily still raised her hackles. It was too much like Mannequin. And she couldn’t stay here. Sooner or later somebody else would come by and she had no desire to lose the safety of anonymity. At least, not more than she already had. She put just the tiniest bit of pressure on the other girl’s arm, a warning, before letting go. "What the fuck do you want from me?"  
  
Skitter didn’t move away, didn't retreat or step back. “We heard Mannequin was testing a candidate and came to investigate. Was it you?”  
  
"Yeah, it was me." Amy ran her thumb over the beginning of the blade he had gifted her, almost gently. "Still doesn't tell me what you want with me."  
  
Again, Skitter raised her hands placatingly. “Look, Jack Slash has set a few rules…”  
  
“I know about those.”  
  
“Right. What matters is that we actually have a chance to push back the Nine out of Brockton Bay.” Amy felt Skitter was being a little too optimistic in the face of what the Nine were capable of doing. Of what they were willing to do. “We just need to keep the candidates alive.” She paused for an instant. “I’m not going to ask why you’re not with your family, or anything. But we can help you, protect you. Regent and Bitch are also candidates so when the Nine come for them, for you, we can be ready and drive them back.”  
  
She processed that. Skitter inviting her, by proxy, into her team. To work with them... So Skitter was trying to  _recruit_  her, instead doing her harm. Like it didn’t throw  
  
 _monster_  
 _as fucked up as your dad_  
  
everything in Amy’s face all over again. She really had no choice, didn’t she? Events just conspired to bring her to the dark side. Was it fate, destiny? Had New Wave’s efforts, her own desperate struggles, been nothing more than a bump on the road she was inexorably rolling down? It certainly looked like the universe was telling her so. It was just plain useless to try and be good and righteous, to redeem herself. She was what she was.  
  
 _Monster_  
  
Well, screw it. Amy was going to be a fucking hero, or die trying.  
  
 _If I must die_  
 _I will encounter darkness as a bride,_  
 _And hug it in my arms._  
 _The valiant never taste of death but once._  
  
She felt herself relax, saw the tension draining out of her muscles. That was right. Amy couldn’t be hurt anymore. She had nothing to fear. All she had to do was accept it. She felt metaphorically and literally lighter than she had in months. Years even. She was alone, the Slaughterhouse Nine were hunting her, villains were putting pressure on her to join them. By all rights, she should have been terrified. Instead, she felt ready to welcome them, all of them, with open arms. There was no other way.  
  
Amy Dallon… No. Just Amy. Amelia even. Amy was going to be a hero or die in the process. Maybe even both at the same time. That was it.  
  
Uncomplicated.  
  
"No.” She answered Skitter. “Let’s put aside the fact that I don’t want Tattletale’s help here, first.” The bitch only complicated stuff, brought it all down. If she opened her mouth, Amy might actually doubt herself, think twice, then thrice and so on until she was trapped by herself and the world around her, not moving by her own power but pressured into things. But it didn’t have to be like that, because in the end it really was uncomplicated. “You  _can’t_  help me. ...And what even makes you think I want to be protected?”  
  
The teenaged super-villain didn't visibly falter, but the background chittering and buzzing gave her away. For a long moment, things were quiet. But Skitter didn’t leave. She just watched Amy, taking in her posture, the slight quirk of her lips, how the skinless muscles of her torso flexed easily with each breath. “Are you... planning on fighting them?” Amy nodded. “By yourself?” Amy allowed herself a full, ironic smile. Skitter shook her head. “You’ll die. Worse than that. They won’t kill you, and even if they do, they’ll give your body to Bonesaw and that’s a fate much worse than death. Even if you can heal yourself.”  
  
 _I thought you’d appreciate this more than anyone._  
 _wet machine meat spot stitches lobotomy control system alert internal bone marrow transfusion_  
  
Amy blinked, shaking away the cotton webs of fear that remained from an entire life of being rightfully terrified of monsters like the Nine. She made a show of shrugging. “They can’t hurt me.” Not them and not the girl in front of her.  
  
“What about New Wave?”  
  
Amy’s eyes snapped up to Skitter’s yellow lenses.  
  
Glad she had finally caught the healer’s attention, the villain pressed on. “If they can’t hurt you directly, they’ll go after your family. And even if you do die, you’re playing right into their hands and Brockton Bay is one step closer to being...  _penalized_  by the Nine.” She paused, letting that sink in. “But we can drive them back. We can win against them, with you. You’re probably the only person who can affect Crawler, maybe even the Siberian. Look, we need you. Bonesaw has some sort of plague ready to unleash if we don’t follow their rules, but they’ll probably use it if they feel like they’re losing anyway, and we need you if we star-”  
  
Amy snickered. Then she let it grow into a full-blown laugh, hollow and echoing. The mutated dog rumbled but she ignored it. Skitter obviously didn’t see the humour in the situation and she was sure that if she could see her face, the bug girl would be slack-jawed. She decided to enlighten her. “You know…” She said. “You almost had me there. Almost made me think it was worth it at least trying something with you. But you want Panacea. Everybody wants Panacea! The miracle healer, the universal cure, the solution to all the fucking problems!” She was shouting at the end, her arms thrown wide open, dramatically. “Guess what? I. Can’t.”  
  
Skitter almost seemed to struggle with words. “Why?”  
  
Amy brought a hand up to tap at the hole that had been made on her shoulder not five minutes before. “My powers changed, that’s why. My Manton limit… inverted. I could heal anybody but myself, before. Can’t heal anybody but myself, now. So you see…” She lowered her voice and let her arms fall to her sides. “I’m not Panacea anymore. I can’t do what you want me to, either way.”  
  
“How did it happen?” Skitter was quick to respond, re-orienting herself almost frighteningly fast.  
  
“Second trigger event. Doesn’t really matter.” What mattered were the consequences. Amy no longer had any inherent value as a healer. Her options had been drastically reduced from an instant to the other. Ot maybe not. Maybe they had simply shifted from healing to killing. Shitty options, all in all.  
  
A buzzing stopped the conversation in its run-down tracks. It wasn’t the endless buzz that Skitter’s flies and other airborne insects produced. It wasn’t almost living, breathing, but artificial instead. Any teenager with a life would recognize it. A cellphone vibrating, hitting something while moving and being muffled. Amy drew her brows together in confusion; hadn’t all electronics been killed by Shatterbird?  
  
Skitter reached behind herself and after some hurried shuffling around, brought into view a blocky-looking phone. “Yes.” The ambient noise that distorted every word she said dropped off to a minimum when she answered.  
  
Amy strained her ears.  
  
With the distance between them, she couldn’t hear what was being said, couldn’t make out words, but she could listen. The cadence, the tone… They said more sometimes. The sound came in short bursts, cut off before they could achieve dull expression. Fast words, halting and desperate, choked out. Repeated, stuttered. The volume of the one-sided conversation dropped almost to inexistence. Skitter tensed even more. Around them the insects swirled faster and faster, yet always fearfully silent. There had to be ways for Amy to improve her audition without compromising her current level of hearing. The eardrum wasn’t an option. Maybe the ossicles could be tweaked. Hair cells were always a good starting point…  
  
The next sound to be transmitted by the phone’s speakers was unmistakably a loud clatter. It was also the last sound that it made.  
  
Two seconds passed.  
  
Skitter nearly crushed the hang up button. When she spoke her own voice was calm but the swarm betrayed her emotions. It raged in brutally efficient ways, rearranging itself and growing in size. “Mannequin is attacking my territory.” Unsaid went the question: are you with us or not?  
  
Amy smiled without humour. “Let me get my things.”


	10. Chapter 10

Amy’s things were reduced to a torn, mud-splattered backpack. She removed what was left of her t-shirt, throwing the rags on the ground, and slung her belongings across her back. In the seconds she had taken to do so, Grue and Hellhound had arrived on their own dinosaur dogs. Grue startled ever so slightly at seeing her and Amy wondered if it was because she was shirtless or if she looked far worse than what she'd thought. She supposed her slapdash patching up would look gruesome to somebody not used to hospitals.

"What's going on?" he asked Skitter.

The villainess, already on her mount, gave a succinct, almost strained response. “Mannequin is attacking me.”

“Genesis?” Amy recognized that name, but she couldn’t tell which group he belonged to. Or had he been an independent? He was a villain if he was working with the Undersiders, but she really was out of touch with the happenings in Brockton Bay’s cape scene. She kept an ear out for the conversation as she strode towards the fourth and smallest dog.

“Down.”

The cloud of insects had receded, Amy noticed. Somewhen between turning her back to Skitter and returning with her backpack, the mass of bugs that had darkened the sky even more than it was and scurried over the ground and walls like a moving, living carpet had dispersed.

"Fuck."

There were still more bugs than it was even remotely sanitary, but one could almost trick themselves into passing those as normal in the flooded city. Amy, who had spent weeks being completely paranoid, waiting for the sign that would bring down the house of cards, easily spotted the controlled lines that the insects followed. For example, there was a thin layer of flies on the muzzle of the monstrosity she was going to ride.

It was a bit different from the others. Smaller but also more streamlined. Where the other monsters of Hellhound's were mismatched, bundles of muscle almost competing to be on top, bone spurs and plates a bit everywhere randomly, this one was more natural, symmetric. It followed her movements with two bloodshot eyes, sunken in the flesh. Amy met it in an unflinching stare and debated holding out her hand for it to smell. It usually worked for the dogs she had known, but besides being under an unholy amount of steroids this guy looked like it was high on PCP. Its tail twitched from one side to the other erratically, tense paws dug ruts in the mud and it pulled on the chain wrapped around its neck to sniff in her direction.

Or like an overeager puppy, a somewhat disturbing attitude for something that more closely resembled a _velociraptor_ than a puppy.

The chain was pulled back harshly. Hellhound glowered menacingly at Amy from atop her own mount. "Get away from him. What the fuck do you want?"

"What does it fucking look like I’m doing?” Amy couldn’t resist laying on the sarcasm thickly. She knew Hellhound wasn’t completely right in the head but she hadn’t thought she was this challenged. “I’m riding him, aren’t I?” Why would they have brought a fourth dog if not for that?

"No."

“I'm not heavy.” In fact, Amy was probably lighter than most large dogs by now.

“He's not trained.”

“That’s enough!” Skitter intervened before things got out of control. “We don’t have time for this shit! She’ll ride with me, Bitch.”

Amy and Hellhound shared one last dirty look, but the hero relented and jogged back to where Skitter was. The villain offered her a hand up, keeping her injured arm close to her body. Annoyance welled up in Amy. “You need to get that reset now. The more you wait, the worst it’ll become.” She gave Skitter a look, half glare, half exasperation, that she’d practiced many times with...

_Victoria_

“Later.” Countered Skitter, knowing how precious time was right now.

Well, if Skitter wanted to cripple herself... “Suit yourself.” Amy grabbed a bone spur and jumped behind her in a display of athletic skill she had never possessed before.

_hydroxyapatite collagen keratin proteins fibers_  
 _Dead_  
 _sac amniotic fluid fur skin muscles nerves veins heart_  
 _Living_

She shook her head clear and poked Skitter’s shoulder, making the villain flinch ever so slightly. “But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”

The dogs sprang forward in response, and Amy decided Skitter was crazy. It was nothing like being flown or, she suspected, riding a horse. Every step the beast gave jostled them, enough that Amy had to grab on to make sure she wasn’t accidentally thrown off, and neither the pace they were setting nor the state of the streets made it any better. Upturned cars, holes, fences, glass and even bodies laying about. There were obstacles everywhere and, while the dog was more than capable of going over them, doing so strongly rattled its riders. The girl in front of her was clinging to the mount like her life depended on it, legs pressing hard against its body and injured hand with a death grip on a spur. Forget extension of recovery time. If Skitter kept this up, she’d lose function on her arm. Amy wasn’t seeing how did the villain expect to fight Mannequin in her condition. Close as she was to Skitter, she could hear her attempting to breathe regularly. Not willing to have the person holding the reins pass out in her, the brown-haired girl moved to grip a couple of spikes in front of Skitter, her arms around the villainess.

_black widow spider: exoskeleton prosoma carapace chitin endos_

Looking down, she saw several familiar red hourglass abdomens moving over Skitter’s costume, looping around her torso and arm. They were spinning web, realized Amy, spinnerets working furiously, dying from exhaustion and being torn away by the wind and rain. Trying to bind her arm, to little success.

“Mannequin.” The bug-controller started abruptly, and it took Amy a second to understand she was talking to her. “What did he have. Weapons, tools, tinker bullshit.”

Mannequin was a tinker. It was something people forgot, and it had completely skipped Amy’s mind. Like all tinkers he modified his equipment, Mannequin’s own body in his particular case, which made him a resourceful, unpredictable foe, no matter what the circumstances. He’d caught her by surprise with the guns, for one. Mannequin probably changed his loadout for every confrontation, but between the crews’ meeting point and Skitter’s claimed territory he wouldn’t have time to make any significant changes.

“He had guns. Two shotguns, in his arms.” Amy recalled the fight under the rain, every step an exercise in balance, walking on a razor-sharp tightrope. “Blades. From his hands and wrists, and on his feet to get a grip on the ground. His body is connected by chains. You can’t get a solid hit in, he just… bends into it.”

“That’s-” Another car in the middle of the road. “- it?”

“It’s all he used against me.” Who knew what else Mannequin had in store.

Skitter grunted and urged the dog faster, spurring it on with cries. Amy barely caught herself as they lurched forward, stopping her face from hitting Skitter’s back, and cursed quietly. The dog underneath her was tiring, the pace too hard and fast. No, perhaps it had something to do with Hellhound’s power. She shot a look over her shoulder to check if the other Undersiders were keeping up. They were, but the distance between them and the others had begun to grow.

“What’s the plan?” She asked Skitter.

“No time for plans. We’re almost there. Just need to drive him off. Kill him if we can.”

Reckless. Amy could get behind that. She had nothing to fear after all. On the other hand, it would be rather pointless if they just died before bringing down at least some the members of the Nine. Amy had no illusions of being able to destroy them, no matter how many dubious allies she fought alongside. Jack Slash had survived being the leader of a band of maniac mass murderers for years and Crawler, most glaringly, was nigh unkillable. The Siberian didn’t even enter her thoughts. But it was possible to kill members of the Nine. More fragile, vulnerable members, like _Shatterbird_ …

_a bloody city reflected in a carpet of wicked glass_  
 _hatred_

Suddenly Skitter stiffened and growled. “Motherfucker!” The villainess jerked the chains that served as reins with her good arm. They jumped, using the walls of the building to their left as a platform to jump again, turning at a right angle. Behind them, bricks fell, the water damaged walls unable to withstand the monstrous dog’s strength. They splashed down on a puddle the size of a small lake, going from wet to absolutely waterlogged. “Go Lucy! _Go_!” The dog’s paws scrambled against the sand and gravel, flexible un-canine fingers digging footholds and hauling out its mass from the water.

Amy didn’t need to ask what had happened. Another dizzying curve later, the two other Undersiders right on their heels, she saw what Skitter had sensed. In an instant, she took in the scene.

A long street, quite likely an avenue before, stretched out in front of them. It was clear somebody had been clearing it out, sand and glass partially swept aside, holes and windows boarded up. And in a slightly higher patch of ground, more visible and dramatic, Mannequin had built them a welcoming monument. A small pyramid, broken bodies huddled together into a rough geometric shape. From there blood was being washed away in pink streams, running down and pooling on broken asphalt. Like a macabre fountain. Mannequin stood in front of the mound of corpses, awaiting them with a foot pressing down on a body. They locked gazes in the rain, the eyeless face regarding them contemptuously, almost disappointed.

Then, he _laughed_.

The dog didn’t break pace, if anything running faster, paws thundering against the pavement as it charged. Skitter’s dark clouds of insects were visible even under the rain, swirling around Mannequin and forming a black wall behind him, cutting off escape. Mannequin straightened and opened his arms, a toreador ready to take the bull by the horns. Amy knew the tackle would have little to no effect on him, no matter how strong the transformed dog they rode on was. He would just let it hit him and disperse the impact, like water or foam. Maybe if the dog managed to get its jaws on him and bite, but she doubted he would let that happen. And that was if the fangs weren’t useless against his white shell.

Amy let go of Skitter, grabbing mismatched bone plates situated behind the villain and pulling her legs up, to crouch on top the monster dog. Her fingers slipped but she _changed_ them, _sharpening_ them into black talons, just long enough that she could hold on despite the water and motion. Her balance was precarious but she didn’t intend to stay mounted. Amy was a melee fighter. Riding the dog gave her some mobility and protection but prevented her from actually doing anything. She just needed to get a bit closer, then she would jump and be able to grab a hold of him. The same tactic as last time.

They were nearly upon him when Skitter reeled back, pulling on the chain around the dog’s muzzle and cursing violently. Amy almost fell as the dog, ever obedient, slammed its paws down in an attempt to slow down. Was Skitter only _now_ thinking about her effective range?

Fuck! Who cared? That wasn’t going to stop Amy. For her, the distance had always been touch range.

Amy leapt as ride and rider unbalanced and skidded a few meters down the road in a heap.

She sailed in the air almost in a straight line. The dog’s momentum, added to the strong muscles and light body she had crafted, carried her the last twenty meters of the charge in a flash. And she slammed into the pile of bodies as Mannequin dodged with a mechanical hiss, jumping up and out of danger himself.

Flesh and blood enveloped her with the sounds of breaking bones and meaty thunks. Half-buried in dead bodies, Amy was suddenly struggling, trying to free herself without damaging the corpses.

_contusion radius pisiform palmar carpal arch flexor carpi ulnaris_

She had to get away and rejoin the battle, but she didn’t want to rip her way out of the pyramid, the warm blood reminding her that just minutes ago these people had been alive.

_laceration iliotibial tract vastus lateralis vastus medialis sartorius rectus femoris femoral artery_

Next to her ear, a weak moan made itself heard and Amy found a sinking feeling once again settling on her gut.

_laceration supraorbital artery supratrochlear artery orbicularis oculi_

She twisted herself and watched as a glassy eye blinked quizzically at her. The owner was clearly suffering from blood loss.

_lungs bronchi alveolar sac alveoli endothelium vasoconstriction lactic acid_

The bodies weren’t just corpses. They were still _alive_.

Amy froze. Behind her she could hear Skitter’s ragged voice but the words didn’t register in her conscious mind. Paradoxically, she was aware that something was clearly wrong. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Skitter’s swarm was pulling back, and she wasn’t breathing air right… No, she was breathing right, the air was what wasn’t right.

_hydrocarbo_

The world exploded.


End file.
